Traffic grooming for minimizing wavelength usage in WDM networks

We consider the traffic grooming problem on general topology WDM networks. The problem is: given a set of t connections and their routes, and the grooming factor g, to find an optimal wavelength assignment and grooming such that the number of wavelengths required in the network is minimized. We first formulate this problem as an integer linear programming problem, and then propose a heuristics method to solve it. Our simulation results show that an increase of the grooming factor can considerably decrease the number of wavelengths required in the system.