Better tradeoff between benefits and costs due to the reconfiguration of the virtual topology in IP over WDM networks

To cater for the burst characteristic of IP traffic, WDM networks are expected to reconfigure the virtual topologies corresponding to the real-time changes of the traffic flow. This paper introduces the elementary algorithms of the virtual topology reconfiguration. Compared to each other, we point out their advantages and disadvantages. Then our paper focuses on the tradeoff between the benefits and costs brought by the reconfiguration of the virtual topologies. We present a evaluation function and two thresholds, namely a lower and a higher. Our presented approach balances between the benefits and costs due to the reconfiguration of the virtual topology, increasing the benefits as much as possible while guaranteeing the low costs, with a distinguished characteristic of taking the state of the network into consideration.