Fast light-path set-up protocol for optical flow switching

In order to decrease the blocking probability of fast light-path set-up in the network, a novel strategy for optical flow switching is proposed, named dynamically initialized wavelength number protocol （DIWP）, which can dynamically change the initialized wavelength number according to the traffic load of the network. Computer simulations are conducted to analyze the performance of the proposed strategy, which is based on forward reservation backward release （FRBR） mechanism. The results show that the initialized wavelength number can affect the blocking probability of the network.