Design of Optimized WDM Networks using Heuristic Algorithms
G. Ramesh1, S. Sundara Vadivelu2 and Jose Anand3
1. Research Scholar, Anna University, Chennai
2. Professor/ECE, SSN College of Engineering, Chennai
3. Assistant Professor/ECE, JAYA Engineering College, Chennai
Email: - ramesh6_2000@yahoo.com, sundaravadivelus@hotmail.com, joseanandme@yahoo.co.in
Abstract – Advances in optical networks, together with
the rapid rising demand for network bandwidth, are
fueling an increasing amount of research in the field of
optical networks. Optical communication has become a
promising networking choice to meet increasing
demand on bandwidth. Some of the emerging
bandwidth-intensive computing and communication
applications such as data browsing on the web, video
conferencing, e-commerce, high-definition video/audio
on-demand processing, data mining, database and
decision-support transactions etc. One of the essential
components for the dynamic provisioning of optical
networks across multiple domains is the routing
strategy adopted. Future optical networks will require
new protocols in order to route and support the on-
demand provisioning of optical networks between
different domains. This paper presents a heuristic
algorithm for the issues of minimizing the cost of
optical cables and to achieve the optimal route in the
design of Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM)
networks.
Keywords:- optical networks, WDM, heuristic
algorithms, routing, topology, NSFNET.
I. Introduction
To cope up with the recent rapid growth of data
traffic volume, it is required to establish large capacity
optical networks. In network links, the transmission
capacity can be increased by using various optical
modulation formats with the wavelength, phase,
amplitude and polarization parameter [8]. An approach
of selecting destinations without regard for resource
availability or location may potentially limit
performance in distributed computing applications,
since alternative destinations may result in lower cost.
The future data and telecommunication networks
are likely to consist of elements such as routers,
switches, DWDM systems, add/drop multiplexers
(ADMs), optical cross-connects, that will use
Generalized Multi-protocol Label Switching (GMPLS)
to dynamically provision resources and to provide
network survivability using protection and restoration
techniques. Switching and routing high capacity
connections are much more economical at the optical
layer than in the electrical domain. To build an
economical network, the following elements are
required:
• Flexibility — involves significant interchanges to
offload traffic in various ways.
• Optics adapted to the distances — systems must
allow the optical signal to go several thousand
kilometers without requiring regeneration.
However, cheap optics for the shorter distances are
preferred. Also, to save cost, each road where the
traffic is heavy must be able to carry maximum
traffic, which leads to the final requirement.
• Option for a number of signals to share the
same optical fiber — enable the best use of the
fiber, if this is important. Installing cable is
expensive, especially on long distances. Getting
the right of way and digging takes time and
money, and this is not an attractive proposition for
a telecom carrier that hopes to get its network
running and producing revenues.
The remaining paper is organized as follows.
Section 2 describes the review of literature on WDM
networks. Section 3 gives the method to find the cost of
the optical cables in the network and section 4
describes the way to optimize the route in WDM
optical networks. Section 5 illustrates with analysis on
experimental results on three different networks.
Finally conclusion is added in section 6.
II. Related Work
Ramamurthy et al [20] presented Integer Linear
Program (ILP) formulations for the routing and
wavelength assignment problem are developed for a
static traffic demand for both path and link protections
schemes. Ho et al [11] proposed that the primary path
is divided into several overlapped segments. The
calculation of the backup path for each sub-domain is
done individually. Redundant trees are used to provide
rapid recovery is presented by Medard et al [16]. Their
algorithm constructs two trees in such a fashion that
each destination vertex is connected to the source by at
least one of the directed trees when any vertex in the
graph is eliminated.

Anand et al [1] presented the performance of sub-
path protection scheme in terms of capacity utilization
and recovery time, compared with path and link
protection schemes. Zang et al [24] developed an on-
line network control mechanism to manage the
connections in WDM mesh networks using path
protection schemes. They use the two-step approach to
route the connections. A new multiplexing technique
called primary-backup multiplexing is proposed by
Mohan et al [18] to improve resource utilization. This
technique allows a primary lightpath to share the same
wavelength with some backup lightpath.
Sen et al [21] proposed to use the link-disjoint path
pair, whose longer path is shortest among all such pairs
of paths, for path protection so that the delay on the
backup path is minimized. They prove that the problem
of finding such a pair of paths is NP-complete, and
they use the one-step approach as the approximation
solution. Xin et al [22] attempted to optimize the
network resource utilization of each call by minimizing
the overall cost of the primary and backup path. The
paths are selected from K precomputed candidate route
pairs.
Bernstein et al [4] proposed the Domain-to-
Domain Routing Protocol (DDRP), which is basically a
hierarchical extension of OSPF-TE that is supported by
a modified version of Dijkstra’s algorithm. For
instance, it returns a single path at a time, so
complementary algorithms need to be adopted for path
protection and diverse routing purposes. Yannuzzi et al
[23] proposed a very pragmatic approach. The proven
scalability of path-vector protocols in the current
Internet suggests that, if OBGP were deployed in the
future, it would probably operate and scale similarly as
BGP does today. They introduced a set of minor
modifications to a path-vector protocol that can be
feasibly implemented in large scale multi-domain
optical settings, as in the case of OBGP, and show that
these modifications are sufficient to drastically
improve the performance of OBGP.
Din [10] considered the routing and wavelength
assignment problem for anycast (ARWA) in
wavelength division multiplexed networks. A hybrid
method, which combines simulated annealing and
genetic algorithm techniques, was proposed to solve
the ARWA problem. Anycast in OBS networks has
been studied by Leenheer et al [9] a proposed an OBS-
based architecture for supporting Grid computing.
Zhu et al [25] considered the traffic grooming
problem in a WDM mesh network. They introduced an
ILP formulation and then developed heuristic solutions.
Hu et al [12] provided a decomposition method that
divides the traffic grooming problem into two smaller
problems and then solved each problem independently.
Antonakopoulos et al [2] proposed the approximation
algorithms for minimizing the total equipment cost and
for minimizing the lightpath count. Chen et al [6]
provided a hierarchical framework for traffic grooming
in a WDM mesh network.
In the study of survivable routing Modiano et al
[17] deal with the problem of routing lightpaths, so that
the virtual topology remains connected when there is a
single fiber cut. The problem is formulated as an
Integer Linear Program (ILP) and solved for regular
topologies and ring topologies. Madhyastha et al [15]
addressed the multicast traffic grooming problem in
metropolitan WDM ring networks with the objective of
minimizing electronic copying. The authors presented
an ILP formulation and then developed a heuristic
approach that consists of three phases: routing, circle
construction and grouping of circles.
Billah et al [5] considered the multicast traffic
grooming problem in WDM mesh networks with
sparse nodal light splitting capability. Chowdhary et al
[7] proposed a non-linear programming formulation
was introduced as an analytical model for the multicast
traffic grooming problem in splitting networks
followed by a number of heuristic solutions. The
authors addressed the problem of many-to-one traffic
grooming in WDM mesh networks with the objective
of minimizing the number of wavelengths and SONET
ADMs. A survey of advances in multicast traffic
grooming is presented by Kamal [14].
III. Cost of Optical Cables
In this section, we discuss the strategies to
minimize the cost of optical cables. Normally by
properly organizing the optical network units, the cost
of the cables can be reduced. The objective is to
minimize the sum of total optical cable cost. Optical
cables are used to connect between the optical network
units and the distributed arrayed gratings in deploying
optical distribution networks using WDM. This cabling
will form a tree structure.
As deployed in a tree structure the vertex set of the
optical cable tree is a subset of the vertex set of the
construction tree [13]. The edge connecting (u, v) in
the optical cable tree is actually the route connecting
vertex u and vertex v in the construction tree. The total
optical cable cost is the sum of the optical cable cost in
all sub-trees. The length of the edge (u, v) will be
represented by ǀ(u, v)ǀ and the weight of the edge (u, v)
will be represented by w(u, v).
 Generally u will be the parent node of v. Number
of child nodes of node v is given by w(u, v). The fibers
in the WDM optical networks will transmit the
upstream and downstream signals in bidirectional
format. The cost of optical cables in the sub-tree is
given by,
q(w ) ǀ(u, v)ǀ (1)
(u, v)
where, E(t) is the set of edges of tree t and q(x) is the
unit price of optical cables containing x optical fibers.
Min-Cost Resource First algorithm
In the MCF algorithm, all the computing resources
are given a rank based on the link cost from the source
node. The min-cost destination among the destination
node is first selected by the source node. Now a
shortest path is established between the source and
destination nodes. Then the next min-cost destination
which is not on the established path will be selected
and the tree grows. This procedure will continue until
all the available resources are found. Figure 1
illustrates the flow chart of the MCF algorithm.

IV. Route Optimization

Routing is the process of selecting paths in a

network along which to send network traffic. Routing
is performed for many kinds of networks, including the
telephone network, electronic data networks (such as
the Internet), and transportation networks. Routing are
or two types namely source routing and hop-by-hop
routing. In source routing, the optical network route is
calculated at the edge node.

Source routing has the advantage of knowing the

path length in advance. Due to this the optimal value of
the offset time can be evaluated correctly. Hop-to-hop
routing is used as the output link at every intermediate
node. This has the disadvantage of not knowing the
length of the path in a prior way and the offset must be
estimated [3].

For the route optimization, a problem in multi-

resource manycast with mesh network is considered
with 6 node, 10 node and 14 node as shown in figure 3,
4 and 5 respectively. In the network, G = (V, E)
represent a graph, in which V is the set of vertices and
E is the set of edges. The number of computing
resources at the each vertex i be ri. In this the available Fig. 1Flowchart of MCF
resources can be reserved by other vertex too. The
objective is to minimize the cost of the tree connecting Most Available First algorithm
with at least k computing resources, which is defined
as, In the MAF algorithm, the destination is first
selected based on the vertex which is having the most
Ʃ cij (2) available resources. Then the shortest path is
established between the source node and the
destination. In this algorithm all the computing
where, cij is the cost of the edge eij between the vertex i resources on the path will be included. Now the next
and vertex j on the tree. Now \for the multi-resoure destination with most available computing resources
manycast problem has two heuristic algorithms based which is not on the selected path is selected. This
on the shortest part tree algorithm are used namely, procedure is stopped until all the required computing
Min-Cost Resource First (MCF) and Most Available resources are included. Figure 2 illustrates the flow
First (MAF) [19]. Both MCF and MAF algorithms are chart of the MAF algorithm.
based on the available computing resources at the
vertex.

Fig. 2 Flowchart of MAF
V. Experimental Results
In this section, the performance of the proposed
algorithms is evaluated in a small, medium and large
sized network with 6-node, 10-node and 14-node
NSFNET, which is shown in figure 3, 4 and 5
respectively. Five set of experiments are conducted on
small network with number of sessions in each
experiment, number of members in a session and no. of
members are randomly selected between [2, 4], [2, 5]
and [0, 5] respectively. Another five set of experiments
are conducted on small network with number of
sessions in each experiment, number of members in a
session and no. of members are randomly selected
between [4, 6], [2, 5] and [0, 9] respectively. Another
five set of experiments are conducted with large
network. For large network the number of sessions in
each experiment is randomly selected between [6, 8].
The number of members in a session is randomly
selected between [2, 5], while members are randomly
selected between [0, 13]. Finally, traffic demand of
members in a session, in all the fifteen experiments is
randomly selected between [1, 16].
Fig. 3 A 6-node NSFNET
Fig. 4 A 10-node NSFNET
Fig. 5 A 14-node NSFNET
Figure 6, 7 and 8 illustrates the performance
analysis of average tree cost for the heuristic
algorithms in the small, medium and large sized
network with 6-node, 10-node and 14-node NSFNET.
The average cost for the heuristic algorithms for all the
network is increased with the increase in required
resources. From the analysis it is shown that for all the
network size MAF achieves the highest tree cost. As
the MAF selects the vertex with the most available
resource each time, the cost of the path may be too
high. The performance of MCF is close to the
performance of MAF, since both the two approaches
consider the vertex with the minimum cost.

Fig. 6 Analysis of Average Tree Cost with 6 node
Fig. 7 Analysis of Average Tree Cost with 10 node
Fig. 8 Analysis of Average Tree Cost with 14 node
VI. Conclusion
Modern high-performance computing systems
require optical networks with high capacity, extremely
high throughput and low latency in order to pass
messages between thousands of processors and
network elements. This paper presents a heuristic
algorithm for the issues of minimizing the cost of
optical cables and to achieve the optimal route in the
design of WDM networks. Among the two heuristic
algorithms MAF and MCF, MCF is the optimized one
with minimum cost in all the three experimented
networks. In future characteristic such as reliability,
survivability and coverage can be improved by a
network topology that is scalable and enables traffic
routing. It is believed that the optical Internet provides
new and strong incentives to build a flexible, efficient
and bandwidth-abundant fiber-optic network
infrastructure capable of providing ubiquitous IP
services.
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G. Ramesh is working as Assistant
Professor in the Department of
Information Technology at KLN College
of Engineering, Madurai, Tamil Nadu,
India. He has completed graduation in
Electrical and Electronics Engineering and Post
Graduation in Computer Science and Engineering. He
is doing research work in optical networking.
S. Sundara Vadivelu is working as
Professor in Department of Electronics
and Communication Engineering at SSN
College of Engineering, Kalavakkam,
Chennai, Tamil Nadu India. His research
interest is in Optical Communication and
Networks. He has published many international and
national journals in optical domain.
Jose Anand received his Diploma from
the state board of Technical Education,
Tamil Nadu, Bachelor of Engineering
Degree from Institution of Engineers
(INDIA), Calcutta, Master of
Engineering in Embedded System Technologies from
Anna University, Chennai, Master of Arts in Public
Administration from Annamalai University, and
Master of Business Administration from Alagappa
University. He is a member of CSI, ISTE, IEI, IETE
and INS. He received State 3rd Rank in Bachelor of
Engineering. He published/presented several technical
papers in various Conferences and Journals, and also
published several books for various polytechnic
subjects in Electrical, Electronics and Computer
Science Disciplines.