We consider the problem of minimizing the number of ADMs in optical networks. All previous theoretical studies of this problem dealt with the off-line case, where all the lightpaths are given in advance. In a real-life situation, the requests (lightpaths) arrive at the network on-line, and we have to assign them wavelengths so as to minimize the switching cost. This study is thus of great importance in the theory of optical networks. We present a deterministic on-line algorithm for the problem, and show its competitive ratio to be 7 4 . We show that this result is best possible in general. Moreover, we show that even for the ring topology network there is no on-line algorithm with competitive ratio better than 7 4 . We show that on path topology the competitive ratio of the algorithm is 3 2 . This is optimal for in this topology. The lower bound on ring topology does not hold when the ring is of bounded size. We analyze the triangle topology and show a tight bound of 5 3 for it. The a...
Mordechai Shalom, Prudence W. H. Wong, Shmuel Zaks