We address the design of rearrangeable multihop lightwave networks hav
ing regular connectivity topology (such as Perfect Shuffle CPS), de Br
uijn (dB) graph, GEneralized shuffle-exchange Multihop NETwork (GEMNET
) and Manhattan Street Network (MSN)). We propose a new formulation of
the combined station assignment/flow routing problem with the congest
ion minimization objective. The formulation is applicable to any regul
ar topology. We then develop a heuristic solution strategy based on ta
bu search. Given our objective, we want to assess the merit of a regul
ar versus an arbitrary topology, as well as compare different regular
topologies across several data instances. In terms of achieving small
congestion las obtained heuristically), the results suggest that with
increased problem sizes, regular topologies become more attractive. In
such cases the benefit of having less restricted arbitrary network to
pology might not be fully utilized. Equivalently,having regular topolo
gy for larger instances will still provide a large enough search space
to (heuristically) obtain good throughput (i.e., small congestion). M
oreover, such design will implicitly offer benefits associated with ma
nagement and operations of regular topologies.