In either case, including the ability to change the wavelength of a signal at an intermediate node increases hardware costs. Wavelength changing is analogous to time slot interchange in TDM networks, however, unlike the latter case, wavelength changers can be prohibitively expensive.
In this talk, we will discuss the how much performance benefit wavelength changers provide for dynamic circuit switched traffic and present a wavelength assignment algorithm for operation of these networks. The algorithm is applicable to a variety of WDM ring architectures, including multifiber rings as well as rings with sparse wavelength conversion (wavelength conversion at a select number of nodes).