Class-based minimum interference routing for traffic engineering in optical networks

In this paper an advanced framework for minimum interference routing is proposed, which, despite its universal nature, is best suited for traffic engineering in optical networks. Minimum interference routing is a method for engineering network resources to minimize the interference among high-volume traffic sources, in an attempt to maximize the useful throughput of the network. The main motivation behind the proposed framework Is a more advanced way of defining the "interference" between routes. This promotes the allocation of light-paths in an optical network without presuming any knowledge of future requests. The basic idea is that network links are classified into distinct criticality classes and additional capacity is defined for each criticality class. This additional capacity represents the amount of additional traffic that can be routed on those links, without increasing the network-wide interference. We provide a concise mathematical formula for class-based interference and propose a polynomial time heuristic to derive criticality classes. Based on our findings a flexible path selection scheme called MIRO is introduced. Finally, through extensive simulation studies, we show that the class-based interference framework more thoroughly describes link criticality than traditional methods, which transforms into more efficient routing in optical transport networks.