Establishment of Dynamic Lightpaths in Filterless Optical Networks

Abstract

In this paper, we study the performance of dynamic routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) in filterless optical networks. These types of broadcast and select networks benefit from breakthroughs in advanced transmission technologies for replacing optical filters and active photonic switching devices, such as wavelength selective switches, with passive optical interconnections between nodes, creating passive optical light trees. We introduce an RWA scheme for establishing passive optical lightpaths in a filterless context and managing unfiltered channels at intermediate egress nodes, which, by propagating downstream of the terminating nodes, participate in wavelength usage and increase the risk of wavelength exhaustion. Simulation results are presented for six network topologies, along with the performance evaluation of active photonic and filterless optical network solutions with static and dynamic RWA schemes. We show that the performance of the proposed scheme depends on the average degree of node connectivity.