An efficient traffic grooming policy for heterogeneous WDM mesh networks

Traffic grooming in WDM optical networks is a technique for aggregating many low-speed traffic streams from users onto a high-speed lightpath. In this scheme the objective of the network operator determines the grooming policy. Since traffic grooming problem in WDM mesh networks is NP-Complete, we propose a new polynomial-time static traffic grooming policy namely RCG (Reducing Congestion) for heterogeneous WDM mesh networks. RCG is designed for the network operator to reduce congestion on the logical topology. In addition to reducing congestion, RCG also tries to reduce the use of wavelength-links, number of lightpaths and the number of traffic hops on the logical topology to the extent possible. To the best of our knowledge, no other recently proposed grooming policy has addressed the issue of reducing congestion, lightpaths, wavelength-links and traffic hops together in polynomial time for heterogeneous WDM networks. Performance comparisons with some earlier well-known grooming policies reveal that the proposed policy is much better for throughput maximization.