Routing of Multimedia Streams in Reconfigurable WDM Optical Networks

Multimedia streams have different requirements than those of traditional data traffic, especially in terms of bandwidth; these requirements have to be taken into account when routing such streams. WDM local-area networks with tunable transceivers have an additional degree of freedom over their electronic counterparts: their topology can be dynamically changed. In this paper, we study the problem of routing multimedia streams in WDM networks, taking into account their traffic requirements and making use of the network's ability to dynamically change the topology. We show that the reconfiguration and routing problem can be written as a linear integer programming problem. Since the exact solution to this problem is complex, we present a simpler heuristic, and show that it provides good results, thus obviating the need for the more complicated exact solution. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the WDM network in a realistic traffic scenario, and show that it compares favorably with that of a centralized switch.