Dynamic routing in congested all-optical networks

This paper presents an online method that jointly controls routing and admission control in all-optical networks. Upon receiving a connection request (request for a lightpath between two points in the, network), the decision to accept or reject each request must be made without any knowledge of future connection requests. Our goal is to improve network throughput by optimizing the utilization of network resources (links & switches) via a selective request blocking mechanism. The framework is geared towards centralized networks with unknown hold times and no statistical assumptions. We simulate the method under various conditions, and the results show that network throughput improves via our controlled request blocking technique.