Routing and wavelength assignments in optical WDM networks with maximum quantity of edge disjoint paths

In the present paper routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) in optical WDM networks is discussed. Previous techniques on based on the integer linear programming and graph coloring are complex and require extensive use of heuristics which makes them slow and sometimes practically not reasonable. Another approach employs the greedy algorithm for obtaining available edge disjoint paths. Even though it is fast, it produces a solution for any connection request which is far from the optimal utilization of wavelengths. We propose a novel algorithm which is based on the maximum flow to have the maximum quantity of edge disjoint paths. Comprehensive computer simulation shows that the proposed method outperforms previous ones significantly in terms of running time. Furthermore, it shows compatible or better performance comparing to others in number of wavelengths used.