QoS-Friendly Wavelength Assignment in Dynamic Wavelength-Routed Optical Networks

In-band crosstalk has been widely considered as a major transmission impairment that significantly impacts the bit error rate (BER) performance of lightpaths in circuit-switched all-optical wavelength-routed networks. Such crosstalk usually occurs when multiple wavelengths pass through an optical crossconnect node, and the magnitude of the crosstalk is largely dependent on the wavelengths assigned to the lightpaths. Traditional wavelength assignment (WA) schemes pay little regard to the physical layer quality of service (QoS), and hence cannot provide optimized network performance in practical networks with imperfect physical transmission media. In this paper, we first present our categorization of in-band crosstalk based on the location of crosstalk generation, then we propose two QoS-friendly WA approaches, one of which selects the wavelength based on the estimated BERs, and the other based on the weighted crosstalk number counting. The two approaches have different computation complexities. Numerical results show that both approaches can significantly improve the BER blocking rate by suppressing the created in-band crosstalk, but the BER-based approach generally gives the better performance at the price of more extensive computation.