Adaptive routing and wavelength assignment in all-optical networks: the role of wavelength conversion and virtual circuit deflection

In WDM all-optical networks without wavelength conversion capabilities, signals must travel on the same wavelength over long distances. During transmission the signal quality gets degraded due to linear and non-linear physical layer impairments resulting in high BER. Many PLI aware RWA algorithms have been proposed in the literature, which consider the effect of the impairments on the signal quality. We consider the effect of component crosstalk and ASE noise. The adaptive RWA algorithm presented incorporates QoS information at both the routing and wavelength assignment steps to mitigate the effect of crosstalk. Different routing strategies are used in the algorithm to compare the computational complexity and the blocking performance of the network.