Optical networks with average packet delay cost criterion

Circuit allocation in all optical networks is formulated as a Markov decision process with average packet delay cost criterion. Multiple classes of fluid traffic arrive at the edge routers and queued until their transmission through end-to-end optical circuits. Circuits are setup and tore down using a twoway reservation protocol and may follow arbitrary routes and wavelengths. A lower bound on the optimal average packet delay is derived and two policies are proposed. One policy is adaptive and is based on the queue lengths; the other uses only the mean offered loads. A general methodology is also proposed to exactly evaluate the performance of adaptive stationary policies in a fluid traffic model. The performances of the proposed policies are demonstrated for a variety of deterministic and random networks and are compared with the lower bound indicating that the adaptive policy is an attractive practical solution for optical circuit allocations.