A RWA Performance Comparison for Hybrid Optical Networks Combining Circuit and Multi-Wavelength Packet Switching

This paper compares several routing and wavelength assignment algorithms for a hybrid optical network architecture combining Optical Circuit Switching (OCS) and multi-wavelength optical packet switching (MW-OPS). In this network, due to the fact that wavelength resources in a fiber are shared between OCS and MW-OPS and in MW-OPS each multi-wavelength optical packet must be encoded into continuous, free wavelengths along the route, the choice of Routing and Wavelength Assignment (RWA) algorithms critically influences the performance of wavelength utilization in the network.