Scheduling of periodic connections with flexibility

Applications that require periodic optical connectivity may be serviced by scheduled lightpaths. Many applications are flexible about when exactly the scheduled lightpaths should occur. Lightpath service providers can exploit this flexibility to schedule connections for better utilization of resources, and presumably lower prices for clients. To find the relationship between network resources and time flexibility, a simple WDM link and a leaky bucket traffic model are considered. The network resources, and in particular the required number of wavelengths WW, are shown to be a function of the traffic parameters and the time flexibility. For random traffic, simulations are used to measure the sensitivity of WW with time flexibility.