The Undirected Optical Indices of Complete $m$-ary Trees

The routing and wavelength assignment problem arises from the investigation of optimal wavelength allocation in an optical network that employs Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM). Consider an optical network that is represented by a connected, simple graph $G$. An all-to-all routing $R$ in $G$ is a set of paths connecting all pairs of vertices of $G$. The undirected optical index of $G$ is the minimum integer $k$ to guarantee the existence of a mapping $\phi:R\to\{1,2,\ldots,k\}$, such that $\phi(P)\neq\phi(P')$ if $P$ and $P'$ have common edge(s), over all possible routings $R$. A natural lower bound of the undirected optical index of $G$ is the (undirected) edge-forwarding index, which is defined to be the minimum of the maximum edge-load over all possible all-to-all routings. In this paper, we first derive the exact value of the optical index of the complete $m$-ary trees, and then investigate the gap between undirected optical and edge-forwarding indices.