A Multicost Approach to Online Impairment-Aware RWA

We design and implement a multicost impairment-aware routing and wavelength assignment algorithm for online traffic. In transparent optical networks the quality of a transmission degrades due to physical layer impairments. To serve a connection, the proposed algorithm finds a path and a free wavelength (a lightpath) that has acceptable signal quality performance by estimating a quality of transmission measure, called the Q factor. We take into account channel utilization in the network, which changes as new connections are established or released, in order to calculate the noise variances that correspond to physical impairments on the links. These, along with the time invariant eye impairment penalties of all candidate network paths, form the inputs to the algorithm. The multicost algorithm finds a set of so called non-dominated Q paths from the given source to the given destination. Various objective functions are then evaluated in order to choose the optimal lightpath to serve the connection. The proposed algorithm combines the strength of multicost optimization with low execution time, making it appropriate for serving online connections.