Dynamic Multicast Traffic Grooming Using Light Trails in Elastic Optical Networks

Traffic grooming is a technique that integrates multiple low-rate traffic into a single communication channel to improve bandwidth usage efficiency. Light trail is a technology that allows traffic to be optically groomed into an optical channel at source and intermediate nodes. Traffic on a light trail can be dropped at multiple nodes along the light trail such that multicast connections can be efficiently provisioned. This paper considers using light trail technology in elastic optical networks and studies dynamic multicast grooming problem in such networks. An auxiliary graph is devised to study the dynamic traffic grooming problem. Based on the auxiliary graph, a dynamic multicast traffic grooming algorithm that employs both light trail and light path grooming is proposed. The proposed dynamic multicast traffic grooming algorithm is shown via simulations to yield better performance than an algorithm that uses only light path grooming.