Distributed Control Protocols for Wavelength Reservation and their Performance Evaluation

This paper describes distributed (or decentralized) protocols for establishing wavelength paths in point-to-point WDM networks. Distributed control improves reliability as well as scalability and reduces implementation cost of a network, but also presents major challenges in managing/allocating wavelengths efficiently. Two types of distributed wavelength reservation protocols are proposed and evaluated, namely forward and backward. The benefit of wavelength conversion is assessed first based on the evaluation of the forward reservation protocols, and it is found that wavelength conversion can result in a performance advantage in a distributed environment. For networks without wavelength conversion, a class of backward reservation protocols is studied and shown to generally perform better than their forward counterparts.