Routing and switching in a wavelength convertible optical network

A wavelength-convertible switch architecture and routing algorithm for circuit-switched wavelength-division-multiplexing optical networks is studied. Wavelength converters are used to resolve wavelength conflicts and to reuse wavelengths. These converters are not dedicated to individual channels, but are shared by the channels of a node or those of an outbound link in the share-per-node or the share-per-link wavelength-convertible switch, respectively. A routing algorithm is developed to converse wavelength converters while maintaining performance close to that of a network with abundant converters. It is found that converters can improve the network performance, such as the blocking probability and fairness, considerably.<>