AbstractsPhysics

Wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) optical networks are commonly used to trans- port huge amount of tra±c in long-haul and metro/regional networks. In these networks, the optical signals deteriorate due to the physical impairments they encounter as they traverse multiple links. This necessitates regeneration of the signals at the intermediate nodes so that the signals will reach the destination with an acceptable level of quality. In translucent optical networks, the regenerators are sparsely placed in the network. Some applications that are transported over these networks require a guaranteed end-to-end quality of service (QoS). The QoS routing in these networks involves two tasks: guaran- teeing the end-to-end QoS requirement, and making sure that the signal quality will be acceptable at the destination by considering the physical impairments. In this thesis, we present physical impairment-aware QoS routing algorithms in translucent optical networks. We have proposed exact and heuristic algorithms that aim at optimally satisfying the QoS requirements, and minimizing the number of regenerators used along the selected path. The attractive feature of our algorithms is that they incorporate both the physical impairments and the regenerator assignment into the path computation process. As a result, the paths are computed efficiently. The experimental results show that each of our algorithms has its own aspect of fitness where it should be the best choice over the others.