A Survey of the Routing and Wavelength Assignment Problem

When transmitting data in an all-optical network, data connections must be established in such a way that two or more connections never share a wavelength on the same fi ber. The NP-hard Routing and Wavelength Assignment (RWA) problem consists of finding paths and wavelengths for a set of data connections. This survey introduces the RWA and gives an overview of heuristic, metaheuristic and exact solution methods from the literature. Running times for the heuristic methods are presented and computational results are discussed.