Optimal design of WDM ring networks via resource-balance

Performance and cost are two most important factors that affect the scalability of a WDM network. To achieve optimal performance with minimal cost, the resources in a network have to be balanced. This work addresses two issues: (1) to determine what is the best possible performance, and more importantly, how to achieve it with the given resources, and (2) to determine which resource is insufficient, which is excessive, and how to balance them. The principle is illustrated by focusing on the problem of establishing complete connections in a WDM ring. It is shown that there is an optimal value of the number of wavelengths for a given number of tunable transceivers per node and vice versa.