Routing, spectrum allocation and regenerator placement in flexible-grid optical networks

Tremendous increase in the number of wireless devices has been resulting in huge growth in the Internet traffic. This growth necessitates efficient usage of resources in the optical networks, which form the backbone of the Internet. Recently proposed flexible optical networks can adjust the optical layer transmission parameters to take advantage of existing channel conditions thereby increasing the resource utilization efficiency. Therefore, flexible optical network is a promising solution to fulfill growing future demand of IP traffic. Apart from efficient usage of the optical spectrum, the degradation of the optical signal as it propagates over the fiber is another problem. In such cases, the optical signal must be regenerated when a lightpath travels longer than the maximum optical reach. However, regenerators are expensive devices with high operational costs. Therefore, they should be placed carefully to reduce the capital and operational network costs. In this dissertation, we deal with the joint routing, spectrum allocation and regenerator placement (RSA-RP) problem for flexible optical networks. Our aim is to find the route and allocate spectrum for each traffic demand by assigning minimum number of nodes as regenerator sites. Firstly, we introduce a novel mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation for the joint RSA-RP problem. Since this formulation is not practical for large networks, we propose a decoupled formulation where the RSA-RP problem is decomposed into two phases. In the first step, we find routes and locations of regenerators assuming a full wavelength converting network. Then, we allocate the spectrum to each demand in the second phase. The decoupled model can be used to solve the RSA-RP problem for reasonably sized optical networks. We show that the decoupled model can find optimum solutions for 92% of the all cases tested for the NSFNET topology and 99% of the all cases tested for the Deutsche Telecom topology. We also show that the locations of regenerator sites significantly depend on network parameters such as the node degree and lengths of the links adjacent to the node.