ABSTRACT
To meet the demanded bandwidth requirements of future optical communication networks, more dynamism,scalability and automatism will need to be provided, which will require, as well, new control plane designs to respond to network changes very rapidly. In this work, we propose the use of an ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm to support the routing and wavelength assignment in wavelength continuity constraint optical burstswitched networks. The main advantage of the protocol is its distributed nature, which provides higher survivability to network failures or traffic congestion. From the results we see that the new protocol responds effectively to congestion while at the same time providing better performance in comparison to the shortest path routing with random wavelength assignment.