Resource aware traffic grooming with shared protection at connection in WDM mesh networks

Traffic grooming schemes have attracted a lot of research attention for addressing the bandwidth mismatch between low data-rate user connection requests and a high capacity lightpath. Survivability of individual user connections is also highly important. The problem of survivable traffic grooming is known to be NP-Complete. In this paper we suggest heuristics to solve the problem in WDM mesh networks efficiently in polynomial time. For ensuring survivability we employ shared protection at connection. We propose three resource-aware static traffic grooming schemes MLWH (Minimizing Lightpaths, Wavelengths and traffic Hops), DLCR (Decreasing Link Capacity Required) and ESCU (Efficient Spare Capacity Utilization). The second and third strategies are enhancement of the first. To the best of our knowledge no other recent paper have addressed the issue of minimizing use of lightpaths, wavelengths and traffic hops, decreasing required link capacity and improving spare capacity utilization of existing logical topology for a given set of connection requests together in polynomial time. Performance comparisons show that our strategies can provide significant benefits.