Routing and Wavelength Assignment (RWA) of lightpaths in optical WDM networks is a challenging task that belongs to a class of complex combinatorial problems. To solve the RWA problem of realistic size, heuristic or meta-heuristic approaches have to be used. In this chapter, an artificial bee colony metaheuristic approach, known as the Bee Colony Optimization (BCO), is used to solve the RWA problem for static lightpath establishment in wavelength routed optical WDM networks. The BCO metaheuristic is tailored here to solve the Max-RWA problem in which the objective is to maximize the number of established lightpaths for a given number of wavelengths. Behind a comprehensive description of the proposed BCO-RWA algorithm, the numerical results obtained by numerous simulations performed over widely used real world European Optical Network (EON) topology are given and compared with some other approaches used to solve the same problem.
Wavelength Assignment Vs. Wavelength Converter Placement in Wavelength-Routed Optical WDM Networks
