LIGHTPATH COMMUNICATIONS - AN APPROACH TO HIGH BANDWIDTH OPTICAL WANS

Emerging applications require a substantially higher bandwidth than the one offered by current networks. The technology necessary for providing high bandwidth on the optical fibers, by means of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), is available. However, none of the network architectures proposed so far can efficiently tap this bandwidth in the wide area domain, due to the limitations imposed by the processing, buffering, and switching required in these solutions. In this paper we propose a novel architectural approach that meets the high bandwidth requirements by introducing a communication architecture based on lightpaths, optical transmission paths in the network. Since lightpaths form the building block or the proposed architecture, its performance hinges on their efficient establishment and management. We show that although the problem of optimally establishing lightpaths is NP-complete, simple heuristics provide near optimal solutions for several of the basic problems motivated by a lightpath based architecture.