MICRON: A framework for connection establishment in optical networks

Traffic grooming in optical networks has gained significance due to the prevailing sub-wavelength requirement of end users. Optical networks get upgraded to the latest technology slowly with time, with only a subset of nodes being upgraded to the latest technology. The optical networks are thus comprised of nodes employing heterogeneous switching architectures. In this paper, we develop a framework, called Methodology for Information Collection and Routing in Optical Networks (MICRON), for connection establishment in WDM grooming networks with heterogeneous switching architectures. We illustrate with examples some of the information that could be collected from a link. The link information may be combined in a variety of ways to obtain different properties of a path. We complete the MICRON framework by providing a generic channel assignment procedure that may be adapted to implement different channel assignment schemes. The framework can be easily implemented with simple traffic engineering extensions to the already existing routing protocols in the wide-area networks.