Destination Initiated Multi-wavelength Reservation Protocol (DIMRP) in WDM Optical Networks: Finding the Optimal Selectivity for Wavelength Assignment

In WDM optical networks, prior to data transfer, lightpath establish-ment between source and destination nodes is usually carried out through a wavelength reservation process. The two common approaches for this, namely Source Initiated Reservation (SIR) and Destination Initiated Reservation (DIR) use only one wavelength for reservation, and, under heavy load, it is often blocked due to outdated link information. The situation can be improved by increasing the number of wavelengths to be attempted for reservation concurrently. This idea, implemented on DIR in this paper, is termed as Destination Initiated Multiwavelength Reservation Protocol (DIMRP). DIMRP is analyzed to find that an optimum number named as selectivity (i.e., number of simultaneous wavelengths to be attempted for reservation) exists for a given value of mean connection requests and total number of wavelengths per link. DIMRP is compared with its peers and overall result appears quite promising to draw the attention of network providers.