Dynamic Wavelength Routing in WDM Networks via Ant Colony Optimization

This study considers the routing and wavelength assignment problem (RWA) in optical wavelength-division-multiplexed networks. The focus is dynamic traffic, in which the number of wavelengths per fiber is fixed. We minimize connection blocking using an ant-colony-optimization (ACO) algorithm that quantifies the importance of combining path-length and congestion information in making routing decisions to minimize total network connection blocking. The ACO algorithm achieves lower blocking rates than an exhaustive search over all available wavelengths for the shortest path.