Quality of service based resource allocation for scheduled lightpath demands

In this paper, we consider resource allocation under the scheduled traffic model, where the setup and teardown times of scheduled demands are known in advance. A number of integer linear program (ILP) solutions for this problem have been presented in the literature. Most of these ILPs minimize the number of wavelength links. A more appropriate metric, for wavelength routed, all-optical networks, is to minimize the congestion (the maximum number of lightpaths on a single fiber link) of the network. We present a new ILP formulation for routing and wavelength allocation, under the scheduled traffic model that minimizes the congestion of the network. We propose two levels of service, where idle backup resources can be used to carry low-priority traffic, under fault-free conditions. When a fault occurs, and resources for a backup path need to be reclaimed, any low-priority traffic on the affected channels is dropped. The results demonstrate that this can lead to significant improvements over single service level models. We also show that the complexity of our formulation (in terms of the number of integer variables) is lower, even compared to existing approaches, which only allow a single level of service. Therefore, we are able to generate optimal solutions for practical networks within a reasonable amount of time, whereas existing formulations often do not find the optimal solution even after 2 h. Finally, we present a simple and fast heuristic that can quickly generate good solutions for much larger networks.