Distributed computing task assignment and lightpath establishment (TALE)

For a future WDM network to efficiently support distributed computing applications that require both execution by multiple geographically separated computing nodes and data transferring between them, traditional approaches to establishing lightpaths between given source destination pairs are not sufficient because a computing task may be executed on any one of several computing nodes having the necessary resources. Therefore, lightpath establishment has to be considered jointly with task assignment to achieve best performance. In this paper, we design and evaluate approaches to the joint optimization of the task assignment and lightpath establishment (TALE) problem. We first formulate the off-line version of the TALE problem and then devise a branch and bound algorithm to obtain the minimum number of wavelengths required to support a set of given jobs. In addition, we propose efficient heuristics to deal with the TALE problem in both off-line and on-line versions. Finally, we demonstrate and compare the performances of proposed heuristics through simulation.