A routing and wavelength assignment scheme considering full optical carrier replication in multi-carrier-distributed optical mesh networks with wavelength reuse

This paper proposes a routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) scheme that considers full optical carrier replication to minimize the number of required wavelengths for wavelength-reusable multi-carrier-distributed (WRMD) mesh networks. Unlike the conventional wavelength division multiplexing networks where each node contains multiple laser diodes, the WRMD networks use a light source, called the multi-carrier light source, to ease the difficulty of controlling many light source devices. The optical carrier replication at any node of optical carrier or any end node of lightpath, called full optical carrier replication, improves the performance of the conventional schemes, which do not consider full optical carrier replication. This paper first formulates the RWA problem considering full optical carrier replication as an integer linear programming problem that minimizes the number of required wavelengths to satisfy the given lightpath setup requests. A heuristic RWA scheme is then proposed to solve the RWA problem in practical times. Simulation results show that our proposed heuristic RWA scheme for the WRMD network achieves a near-optimum number of wavelengths. In addition, it is able to reduce the number of required wavelengths for lightpath establishment, compared to the conventional scheme.