Benefits of advertising wavelength availability in distributed lightpath establishment

In this paper, we study the benefits of advertising wavelength availability in a distributed lightpath establishment environment by extensive simulations. Various cases with different routing and wavelength assignment methods, densities of wavelength conversions, and degrees of network connectivities are evaluated. In all these cases, we show that advertising wavelength availability can only improve network blocking performance under light traffic load. In addition, we demonstrate how the performance gain is affected by routing methods, wavelength conversion, and network topology.