Kluwer Dutta 2000
Kluwer Dutta 2000
Kluwer Dutta 2000
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Rudra Dutta
Department of Computer Science
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, NC 27695-7534
rdutta@csc.ncsu.edu
George N. Rouskas
Department of Computer Science
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, NC 27695-7534
rouskas@csc.ncsu.edu
Keywords: Virtual Topology, Logical Topology, Wavelength Division Multiplexing
(WDM), Wavelength Routed Network, Lightpath, All Optical Network
Abstract
A virtual topology over a wavelength routed WAN consists of clear
optical channels between nodes called lightpaths. These carry traffic
end-to-end without electronic switching, creating an optical layer of the
topology. 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 chapter we provide a complete formulation of the problem and
survey the literature on the topic. We restrict ourselves to transport
networks rather than local area networks, and static topology design as
opposed to topologies in which individual lightpaths are set up and torn
down in response to traffic demands.
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2
1. INTRODUCTION
Wide area “All Optical Networks” with wavelength division multiplex-
ing (WDM), using wavelength routing, are considered to be candidates
for future wide area backbone networks. The ability to tap into attrac-
tive properties of optics, including the very high bandwidth potential
of optical fiber, makes these networks attractive for backbone transport
networks. At the same time, the WDM technique can be used to bridge
the mismatch between user and fiber equipment. A fuller discussion of
wide area optical networks can be found in (Green, 1992; Mukherjee,
1997; Ramaswami and Sivarajan, 1998; Green, 1996).
In recent times, there has been growing interest in virtual topology
design problems on these networks. Virtual topology design over a WDM
WAN is intended to combine the best features of optics and electronics.
The architecture uses clear channels between nodes, called lightpaths,
so named because they traverse several physical links but information
traveling on a lightpath is carried optically from end-to-end. Usually
a lightpath is implemented by choosing a path of physical links and
reserving a particular wavelength on each of these links for the lightpath.
This is known as the wavelength continuity constraint, indicating that a
lightpath consists of a single wavelength over a sequence of physical links.
Because of limitations on the number of wavelengths that can be used,
and hardware constraints at the network nodes, it is not possible to set
up a clear channel between every pair of source and destination nodes.
The particular set of lightpaths we decide to establish on a physical
network constitutes the virtual (otherwise called the logical) topology.
The tradeoff involved here is between bandwidth and electronic pro-
cessing overhead. Forming lightpaths locks up bandwidth in the corre-
sponding links on the assigned wavelength, but the traffic on the light-
path does not have to undergo optoelectronic conversion at intermediate
nodes. A good virtual topology trades some of the ample bandwidth in-
herent in the fiber to obtain a solution that is the best of both worlds.
Optical fiber can be used simply as a point-to-point link carrying
only one channel, using one wavelength. The use of WDM increases the
bandwidth available and the use of virtual topologies effects reduction of
delay, allowing more efficient use of bandwidth by appropriate routing.
Fig. 1.1 shows a simple physical network in which lightpaths, indicated
by dotted lines, have been set up to allow communication by a clear
channel between nodes which are not directly connected by a fiber link.
An attractive feature of the process of stepping up from point-to-point
fibers to WDM and then virtual topologies is that it can be undertaken in
an incremental manner with current networks (Mukherjee et al., 1996).
Design of Logical Topologies for Wavelength Routed Networks 3
Routing
Node
Lightpath
Access Node
Figure 1.1 A WDM network. The routing nodes are interconnected by point-to-
point fiber links and may have access nodes connected to them. The dashed lines and
dotted lines show lightpaths.
2.1 NOTATIONS
In this section, we define some terminology and notations and in-
troduce some concepts which will be used in the following sections, and
which are common to most formulations of the virtual topology problem.
2.2 ARCHITECTURE
In this section we characterize in more detail the WDM wavelength
routed network we have been describing above, and which Fig. 1.1 il-
lustrates. The network consists of several routing nodes which are con-
nected to each other by point-to-point optical fibers, specified by the
physical topology. Each of the routing nodes may have access nodes
connected to it. For the purposes of virtual topology design, however,
only the aggregate traffic between routing nodes is important. Thus we
can assume that each routing node has exactly one access node con-
nected to it. We concentrate on the routing nodes and refer to them
simply as nodes. The traffic matrix specifies the aggregate traffic from
every node to each of the other nodes.
The fiber links connecting the nodes each support a specific number of
wavelengths, say W . Each of the nodes is equipped with a WR capable
of routing these W wavelengths. In general, no wavelength conversion
capability is assumed to exist at any of the nodes.
Lightpaths are set up on the physical topology, creating the virtual
topology. A lightpath is set up by configuring the source and destination
nodes to originate and terminate a specific wavelength, then choosing a
path from the source to destination node and configuring the WR at each
intermediate node on that path to forward that wavelength optically
to the next node. Two lightpaths that share a physical link must be
assigned different wavelengths. The total number of wavelengths used
on all links must be W or less. It is usually assumed that the numbers of
lightpaths terminating and originating at each node are equal, and this
number is same for each node. Thus the network is usually assumed to
have a unique logical degree.
Design of Logical Topologies for Wavelength Routed Networks 9
3. PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION
In this section we provide an exact formulation of the virtual topology
design problem using the packet traffic approach, and discuss specific
techniques and heuristics used to solve it.
3.1 FORMULATION
The exact formulation of the virtual topology problem is usually given
as a Mixed Integer Linear Program. The formulation provided here fol-
lows closely that in (Krishnaswamy and Sivarajan, 1998), and also those
in (Ramaswami and Sivarajan, 1996; Mukherjee et al., 1994; Mukherjee
10
et al., 1996). The symbols and terminology are as defined in Section 2.1.
New terminology is defined as necessary.
Degree Constraints
X
bij ≤ ∆l , ∀i (1.2)
j
X
bji ≤ ∆l , ∀i (1.3)
j
Traffic Constraints
Wavelength Constraints
W −1
X (k)
cij = bij , ∀(i, j) (1.8)
k=0
Design of Logical Topologies for Wavelength Routed Networks 11
(k) (k)
cij (l, m) ≤ cij , ∀(i, j), (l, m), k (1.9)
X (k)
cij (l, m) ≤ 1, ∀(l, m), k (1.10)
ij
PW −1 P (k) PW −1 P (k)
k=0 l cij (l, m)plm − k=0 l cij (m, l)pml
bij , m=j
(1.11)
= −bij , m = i ∀(i, j), m
0, m=6 i, m 6= j
Hop Constraints
X (k)
cij (l, m) ≤ hij , ∀(i, j), k (1.12)
lm
from a given source node to all destination nodes, that is, not formulate
the problem in terms of the traffic components between each source-
destination pair λ(sd) , but traffic components for each source node λ (s)
only. This results in a more tractable formulation because the num-
ber of variables and constraints is smaller, otherwise the formulation is
similar. Of course, a solution to such an aggregation does not provide a
complete solution, moreover there may be no corresponding complete so-
lution. However, the aggregate problem, being less constrained than the
original one, helps set achievability bounds on the full problem, such as
lower bounds on the achievable congestion (Ramaswami and Sivarajan,
1996; Krishnaswamy and Sivarajan, 1998). Bounds which can be calcu-
lated with significantly lower computational costs than solving the full
problem are useful in evaluating heuristics, as discussed in Section 3.2.
Usually, such an aggregate formulation is used after relaxing the MILP
above into an LP, that is, allowing the lightpath, lightpath wavelength
and link-lightpath wavelength indicator variables to take up values from
the continuous interval [0, 1] rather than constraining them to be bi-
nary variables. The relaxation, like the aggregate formulation, results
in a less constrained formulation, When the MILP is relaxed, an extra
“cutting plane” constraint is introduced (Ramaswami and Sivarajan,
1996; Krishnaswamy and Sivarajan, 1998), to ensure that the definition
of congestion remains consistent with the MILP formulation when traffic
components may be weighted with the “fractional lightpaths” that the
relaxation introduces.
3.2 HEURISTICS
The problem, whose exact formulation is given in Section 3.1, and
some of its subproblems are known to be NP-hard (Chlamtac et al., 1992;
Mukherjee et al., 1994; Krishnaswamy and Sivarajan, 1998; Banerjee and
Mukherjee, 1996). Thus for networks of moderately large sizes it is not
practical to attempt to solve this problem exactly. Heuristics to obtain
good approximations are needed. In the rest of this section we discuss
heuristic approaches to the virtual topology design problem or to related
subproblems.
are usually relaxed so that at least some solution is obtained from the
heuristics, which can be then tested for near optimality using achievabil-
ity bounds as we discuss in the following section. One of the constraints
which is commonly relaxed is that of the maximum number of wave-
lengths that can be carried by a fiber. Sanity checks must be performed
at the end to verify that the solution obtained is feasible.
The virtual topology problem can be decomposed into different sub-
problems than the ones we list above. Such different decompositions
are used in many of the studies we survey. However, we consider the
above decomposition to be reasonable and fairly consistent with any
others proposed in the literature we survey, and we shall refer only to
this decomposition while discussing such studies.
Sk is the sum of the traffic fractions (with respect to total network traffic
r) which are assumed to be carried in k hops. These traffic fractions can
be determined as follows: arrange the traffic fractions in descending
order of magnitude, and divide them in blocks, the i-th block being
made up of N ∆il successive fractions in that list. Thus the first block
consists of the first N ∆l traffic fractions, the second block consists of
the next N ∆2l traffic fractions, and so on. Then the sum S k is the sum
of the traffic fractions which form the k-th block.
Minimum flow tree bound: This bound is derived from similar con-
siderations as above, but on a per node basis. In this bound, we take
into account the restriction that each source node can only source ∆ l
lightpaths altogether, in addition to the considerations above. Thus this
is a stronger bound. The traffic weighted average number of logical hops
H is bounded by assuming that each node is connected by one logical
hop to the ∆l nodes to which it has the largest amounts of traffic, by
two hops to the ∆2l nodes to which it has the next largest amounts of
traffic, and so on. We omit the derivation and exact expression of this
bound, which can be found in (Ramaswami and Sivarajan, 1996).
atively deviates flows over alternate paths, avoiding links carrying the
largest amounts of traffic.
all, but concentrates on creating lightpaths that use only a few physical
edges, since this should conserve wavelengths.
A similar heuristic maximizing one logical hop traffic is briefly de-
scribed in (Banerjee and Mukherjee, 1997), but a heuristic with the
opposite objective is also suggested. This heuristic aims at maximiz-
ing multihop traffic, since concentrating only on single hop traffic can
lead to congestion due to multihop traffic. Some results are provided
in which the two approaches appear to perform very similarly to each
other. Details of wavelength assignment are not discussed.
The study in (Banerjee et al., 1997) also suggests that attempts to
maximize one logical hop traffic concentrate on the comparatively larger
traffic components, and may cause the smaller traffic components to be
routed unreasonably and cause congestion on some physical links. A
scheme involving mapping the network to a bipartite graph is specified
to avoid unbalanced loading. A known graph algorithm is then specified
as a heuristic for wavelength assignment.
In (Krishnaswamy and Sivarajan, 1998), a heuristic algorithm follow-
ing the LP relaxation heuristic from (Ramaswami and Sivarajan, 1996),
but more complete, is presented. The lightpath wavelength indicator
variables are also rounded and then a least resistance algorithm followed
to choose a single routing for each lightpath. A final phase of the design
eliminates wavelength clashes.
4. RELATED APPROACHES
In this section we discuss some techniques and algorithms that are
different from those described in Section 3.2, but which are related to
the problem of virtual topology design for wavelength routed networks.
5. RECONFIGURATION ISSUES
As we have already remarked, the problem of reconfiguring a network
from one virtual topology to another is a related problem to virtual
topology design. Two possible approaches to this problem are discussed
in this section.
6. CONCLUDING REMARKS
The problem of virtual topology design for wide area wavelength
routed optical networks covers a considerable area, and many approaches
to this and related problems have been taken in the literature. The light-
paths of a virtual topology are set up to trade off the ample bandwidth
available in the fiber with the optoelectronic conversion and electronic
processing at intermediate nodes. Exact formulations of the problem are
known to be computationally intractable, so heuristics for determining
and implementing a virtual topology have been proposed. Most heuris-
tics attempt to address parts of the problem rather than the whole, by
decomposing the problem approximately into subproblems, or address
special cases of network topology.
Virtual topology design is a growing research area. New areas of inves-
tigation include extending results obtained for special cases to broader
context, and extending the freedom allowed in formulating the problem
to take advantage of improving equipment capabilities.
References
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