MPhil Thesis Defence


"Resource Allocation and Management in Optical Networks using the
Blocking Island Paradigm"

By

Mr. Zhemin Ding


Abstract

Resource allocation and management is a key problem in optical networks.
It covers many different topics such as routing and wavelength assignment
(RWA), traffic grooming and load balancing, etc. Numerous algorithms have
been proposed to address those issues. But those algorithms treat each
topic separately and fail to realize the similarity and consistency of the
ONRMA (optical network resource management and allocation) problem. This
thesis concerns itself with a general framework to address the ONRMA
problem. It can efficiently plan the allocation of network resources to
connection requests and provide a novel way of identifying the bottlenecks
in the network. This framework is based on a clustering scheme called
Blocking Island.

In this thesis, we firstly introduce some issues of optical network
resource management and allocation. We study the problem of lightpath
establishment in WDM optical networks, which is also known as the routing
and wavelength assignment (RWA) problem. Then Traffic grooming and Optical
network survivability are discussed. We also introduce other important
techniques in handling optical network reconfiguration and quality of
service (QoS), namely, Load Balancing, Optical Burst Switching and MPLS.

Inspired by the idea of Blocking Island, we design a network model called
Blocking Island Graph (BIG), which can be employed to solve many issues of
optical network resource management and allocation.

A generic RWA algorithm, BI_RWA, is proposed. This algorithm can solve the
RWA problem under different assumptions: static or dynamic traffic, and
single or multiple fiber links between node pairs. We also apply the BI
paradigm to solve the problem of placement of wavelength converters in all
optical networks.

We explore traffic grooming in mesh networks. With the development of
Internet, the focus of traffic grooming is evolving from ring topologydto
mesh topology. We present an ILP (integer linear programming) formulation
to minimize the network cost (transceivers and wavelength). We also
propose a new heuristic based on Blocking Island paradigm for traffic
grooming in mesh networks.


Date:				Thursday, 8 August 2002

Time:				10:00a.m.-12:00noon

Venue:				Room 2303
				Lifts 17-18

Committee Members:		Dr. Mounir Hamdi (Supervisor)
				Dr. Brahim Bensaou (Chairman)
				Dr. Gary Chan


**** ALL are Welcome ****