A common approach for establishing connection requests in an optical ring network that uses�wavelength-division multiplexing is to first find a routing of the requests that minimizes the congestion and then deal with the wavelength allocation.� The congestion of a routing, however, does not reflect its wavelegth requirements. Indeed, we observe that for certain instances such an approach can result in considerable waste of network resources.� To overcome this, we propose a new routing objective, namely to minimize the maximum clique of the routing, i.e., the maximum number of connections that pairwise share a common fiber. We present optimal algorithms and heuristics for finding minimum clique routings and perform experiments to evaluate their performance.
Time permitting, we will briefly discuss another related routing problem: we will introduce the notion of a generalized failure event and the problem of finding reliable routings in networks that suffer from such failures. Instead of presenting results in detail we will mainly point to existing open problems and research directions.
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