Survivable wavelength-routed optical network design using genetic algorithms

The provision of acceptable service in the presence of failures and attacks is a major issue in the design of next generation dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) networks. Survivability is provided by the establishment of spare lightpaths for each connection request to protect the working lightpaths. This paper presents a genetic algorithm (GA) solver for the routing and wavelength assignment problem with working and spare lightpaths to design survivable optical networks in the presence of a single link failure. Lightpaths are encoded into chromosomes made up of a fixed number of genes equal to the number of entries in the traffic demand matrix. Each gene represents one valid path and is thus coded as a variable length binary string. After crossover and mutation, each member of the population represents a set of valid but possibly incompatible paths and those that do not satisfy the problem constraints are discarded. The best paths are then found by use of a fitness function and these are assigned the minimum number of wavelengths according to the problem constraints. The proposed approach has been evaluated on dedicated path protection and shared path protection. Simulation results show that the GA method is efficient and able to design DWDM survivable real‐world optical mesh networks. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.