Estimating the blocking probability in wavelength-routed optical networks

In this work, a new methodology to compute the blocking probability in wavelength-routed optical networks is presented. The proposal is based on an interactive procedure, named Interactive Matrix Methodology (IMM), that executes actualization of the network traffic distribution in order to reach a precise blocking performance. The IMM updates an initial network link load continuously and computes the blocking probability for each output link considering that the traffic among the links is dependent and related with all links and nodes in the network, not only with all links in a given path or route. The simulation results obtained in the same conditions and in several optical network scenarios match very well with the theoretical approximation achieved with this methodology. The advantage of this theoretical methodology is to be fast, accurate and applicable in low load regions, where a discrete event simulation is not precise. Furthermore, this method can be used to compute the estimative of blocking probabilities per node and in the network, including the cases where the number of wavelengths is different on each node. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.