Abstract

In the past few years, there has been growing interest in wide area "All Optical Networks" with wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), using wavelength routing. Due to the huge bandwidth inherent in optical fiber, and the use of WDM to match user and network bandwidths, the wavelength routing architecture is an attractive candidate for future backbone transport networks. A virtual topology over a WDM WAN consists of clear channels between nodes called lightpaths, with traffic carried from source to destination without electronic switching "as far as possible", but some electronic switching may be performed. Virtual topology design aims at combining the best of optical switching and electronic routing abilities. Designing a virtual topology on a physical network consists of deciding the lightpaths to be set up in terms of their source and destination nodes and wavelength assignment. In this survey we first describe the context and motivations of the virtual topology design ...

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