Analysis of single-hop traffic grooming in mesh WDM optical networks

Traffic grooming is a significant task in internetworking between an optical wavelength-routed core network that supplies "pipes" at the wavelength-granularity, and the attached client (e.g., IP) networks that usually require connections of sub-wavelength granularity. The focus of this study is to develop a theoretical performance analysis model for online traffic grooming in mesh optical networks. This paper first briefly discusses the difficulty in applying the analytic models developed for circuit-switched networks (including wavelength-routed optical networks) to the traffic grooming problem. It then develops a link blocking model based on the continuous time Markov chain and queueing theory, and finally conducts end-to-end performance analysis based on the Erlang fixed-point approximation. The results obtained from the analytic model are shown to match well with numerical results obtained from simulations.