On the impact of network topology aggregation in multi-domain lightpath provisioning

Dedicated network circuits (lightpaths) are an effective way to provide enhanced quality of service to demanding applications. Lightpaths are popular in the scientific community, where applications transport large quantities of data around the world for distributed visualisations or computations. Many research networks support this service model internally and co-operate to extend the service beyond their network boundaries.
Inter-domain lightpath provisioning requires some degree of knowledge of topology data, but network operators do not always wish to exchange their full topology, either for security, business, or for scalability reasons.
We present in this article a simulation study on the impact of topology aggregation for multi-domain lightpath provisioning. In particular we focus on the consequences of aggregation in the path finding process. Our work shows that a full mesh representation of the border nodes provides the best results among the various aggregation strategies. Our study uses realistic topologies for hybrid optical networks and this leads to results different from previous studies.