Survivable traffic grooming with path protection at the connection level in WDM mesh networks

Survivable traffic grooming (STG) is a promising approach to provide reliable and resource-efficient multigranularity connection services in wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) optical networks. In this paper, we study the STG problem in WDM mesh optical networks employing path protection at the connection level. Both dedicated-protection and shared-protection schemes are considered. Given network resources, the objective of the STG problem is to maximize network throughput. To enable survivability under various kinds of single failures, such as fiber cut and duct cut, we consider the general shared-risk-link-group (SRLG) diverse routing constraints. We first resort to the integer-linear-programming (ILP) approach to obtain optimal solutions. To address its high computational complexity, we then propose three efficient heuristics, namely separated survivable grooming algorithm (SSGA), integrated survivable grooming algorithm (ISGA), and tabu-search survivable grooming algorithm (TSGA). While SSGA and ISGA correspond to an overlay network model and a peer network model, respectively, TSGA further improves the grooming results from SSGA and ISGA by incorporating the effective tabu-search (TS) method. Numerical results show that the heuristics achieve comparable solutions to the ILP approach, which uses significantly longer running times than the heuristics.