With new optical transport systems able to provide sub-wavelength granularity, the dynamic characteristics of the network are expected to strongly increase. Furthermore, such properties are highly related to the underlying physical network topology, which in turn require from the control plane important features such as scalability, dynamism and automatism. In this paper we analyze the properties of a distributed routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) algorithm for wavelength continuity constraint optical networks which uses forwarding and updating control functions run by forward and backward control packets, respectively. In the paper, the protocol is evaluated through its implementation in optical burst switching (OBS) on four different transport network topologies. Results show that the protocol outperforms other RWA algorithms under test in terms of blocking probability without worsening other metrics such as end-to-end delay.

Peer Reviewed