WDM network planning in a changing environment

This paper studies the planning of survivable all-optical networks on a long-term basis (e.g., considering a planning horizon of two to five years). Due to rapid changes on both demand and technology side, a quite dynamic long-term. behaviour can be expected for such networks. This enforces a planning technique which takes the time-dependent nature of demand and cost data explicitly into account. Considering a particular WDM network planning problem, several techniques are presented to serve problem instances of realistic size. Extensive simulations are carried out to compare the performances of the proposed planning techniques. This allows us to infer some general guidelines for long-term network planning.