On the robustness of planning methods for traffic changes in WDM networks

Many conventional WDM network planning and/or designing schemes assume that future traffic demand is known beforehand. However, it is difficult to predict future traffic demand accurately. We develop a scheme to design a WDM network that accommodates as much traffic as possible against a variety of traffic patterns, that is, a WDM network robust against traffic uncertainties. Our basic idea is to select a node pair that is expected to be a bottleneck in the future and then to deploy network equipment so that the volume of traffic accommodated by the node pair increases. Our simulation results show that the WDM network designed with our method can accommodate more traffic demand than those designed with the existing methods at the same cost.