A Genetic Algorithm Way of Solving RWA Problem in All Optical WDM Networks

Abstract

This research work presents a Genetic Algorithm (GA) heuristic approach to solve the static Routing and Wavelength Assignment (RWA) problem in Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) networks under wavelength continuity constraint. The RWA problem is modeled as an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problem with the optimization objective to balance the network load among the connection requests. We consider ARPANET as the standard simulation network and use Genetic Algorithm technique to solve the formulated ILP on such network to produce a near optimal solution in polynomial time. We state three different fitness functions, all of them aim at balancing the network load among individuals and compare them while optimizing different network parameters.