ABSTRACT
This chapter describes schemes for adaptive routing and for adaptive wavelength assignment in an all-optical network, and examines the improvements these two kinds of adaptivity can offer on performance. For the specific adaptive routing scheme that we examine, we demonstrate that, for the hypercube and torus topologies considered, providing (at most) one alternate link at every hop gives a per-wavelength throughput that is close to that achieved by oblivious routing with twice the number of wavelengths per link. Also, we examine the effect of limited wavelength conversion in network performance and find that limited conversion to only one or two adjacent wavelengths can provide a considerable fraction of the improvement that full-wavelength conversion provides over no-wavelength conversion. These results clearly emphasize the need for network designers to investigate the tradeoffs between wavelength conversion, routing flexibility, and hardware cost when designing future optical networks.
