Low-cost design approach to WDM mesh networks

This article presents a mathematical model and an efficient heuristic that results in a low-cost network design to satisfy a set of static point-to-point demands. It considers the problem of routing working traffic and assigning wavelengths in an all-optical network. This problem is known as the Routing and Wavelength Assignment (RWA) problem. The model and heuristic give a physical network configuration selecting a lowest cost set of components of the network (subnetworks and switches) with sufficient capacities to attend all demands. The solutions obtained are compared to existing results found in the literature using the same instances. We treated the project of a network without wavelength conversion because it introduces a delay (Optical-Electrical-Optical mappings) and this should be avoided in our environment, a core of a backbone.