ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Routing and wavelength assignment

Routing and wavelength assignment is like playing with toy cars and a garage.

Imagine you have a bunch of toy cars that need to get to different destinations, and a garage that has a bunch of parking spots for the cars to wait until they can continue on their journey.

In the same way, routing is like telling each car what path to take to reach its destination. You might tell one car to take the highway, another to take a side street, and a third to take a different route altogether.

Wavelength assignment, on the other hand, is like deciding which parking spot in the garage each car should wait in before continuing on their journey. The garage has different levels or floors, and each parking spot is a different color or wavelength of light.

Sometimes you need to make sure that cars of the same color (or wavelength) don't try to park in the same spot, because then they will crash into each other.

So, routing and wavelength assignment are two important tasks in making sure that a bunch of cars (or data packets, in the case of telecommunications) can get to their destinations without crashing into each other or causing traffic jams.