Minimizing Cost of Regeneration at Regeneration Sites–A New Approach for Dynamic Lightpath Establishment in Translucent Optical Networks

Lightpaths in translucent optical networks have to undergo regeneration at certain nodes designated as regeneration sites to maintain its quality of transmission. Regenerating an optical signal necessitates optical-electronic-optical conversion and is thus a costly affair due to use of regeneration resources. Thus minimizing the cost of regeneration in such networks is vital. Minimizing cost of regeneration leads to two different problems; 1) the problem of minimizing the total cost of regeneration for the connections served and 2) the problem of minimizing the cost of regeneration at regeneration sites while serving the connections. The previous works on lightpath establishment in such networks have mostly addressed the first problem. In this paper we study the second problem i.e. the problem of minimizing the cost of regeneration at regeneration sites during dynamic establishment of lightpaths. As the problem is NP-Complete, we propose an Integer Linear Program for small networks and then propose two heuristic routing approaches for large networks. Time complexity analysis shows that our heuristic algorithms run in polynomial time. Extensive simulation experiments reveal that our approaches are not only efficient to address the problem but can also provide better blocking performance when regeneration resources are scarcely deployed at regeneration sites.