Design of reconfigurable lightpaths in IP over WDM networks

The forwarding speed of IP routers must grow to accommodate the skyrocketing amount of traffic on the Internet. MPLS, which relies on the high processing power of lower layers, is a solution and it is under developing. On the other hand, a WDM network has been expected as a high-speed network, but it is also called a stupid network because of lacking its traffic granularity. In order to bridge between these two layers, an IP over WDM network by a concept of MPLS has been proposed. This network has a potential to effectively use large transmission capacity provided by WDM technology. In this paper, we design IP over WDM networks that reconfigure IP routing and lightpaths each day or month. We formulate a problem that maximizes the network throughput based on integer linear programming. Through numerical examples, we show that the increase of the network throughput in IP over WDM networks is larger than that of IP networks. We also show the area where this method is applicable to the reconfigurable network.