Survivable Traffic Grooming RWA Protocol for WDM Networks

In this paper, we have presented an efficient RWA protocol for WDM networks. The optimal and sub-optimal lightpaths are found by the ants (control agents) depending upon the number of free wavelengths available, the length of the lightpath (hop count) and number of conversion required from source to destination. When a connection request arrives at a node, the high speed data are routed through the readily available optimal lightpath thereby reducing the processing time. The low speed data are first tried to groom over the existing low speed data, else routed through the readily available lightpath. As opposed to the reactive protocols, our proposed protocol is proactive in the sense that it proactively updates the changes in the network status using the concept of ant colony optimization. Further for survivability backup lightpath is maintained. The selection of backup lightpath is done in such a way that there is no shared link between the primary and backup lightpath but it can be shared with another backup lightpath. By simulation results, we showed that our proposed protocol has low blocking probability and delay.