New Techniques for Efficient Traffic Grooming in WDM Mesh Networks

Traffic grooming techniques are used to combine low-speed data streams onto high-speed lightpaths with the objective of minimizing the network cost, or maximizing the network throughput. In this paper, we first present an efficient integer linear program (ILP) formulation for traffic grooming on mesh WDM networks. Our formulation can be easily modified to implement different objective functions. Unlike previous formulations, our ILP formulation can be used for practical sized networks with several hundred requests. We then propose a second ILP for traffic grooming, with the simplifying assumption that RWA is not an issue. This second formulation is able to generate, in a reasonable time, grooming strategies, for networks with over 30 nodes, with hundreds and even thousands of low-speed data streams. Finally, we introduce a set of ILP formulations for traffic grooming, where the logical topology is specified. We have studied, using simulation, the time needed to determine grooming strategies, using the different ILP formulations.