On-line approaches for provisioning connections of different bandwidth granularities in WDM mesh networks

Summary form only given. We consider an arbitrary-topology, optical mesh network which employs wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) to multiply the bandwidth on its links. Our present work is devoted to the dynamic traffic-grooming problem where connection requests (of different bandwidth granularities) arrive randomly, they need to be provisioned in real time, and to be torn down when they are over. To solve this problem, we first present five different grooming policies, e.g., whether or not to use one or more existing lightpaths to accommodate a new connection, when to set up a new lightpath, and so on. Then, we propose two distributed route-computation algorithms based on these grooming policies. Performance comparisons of these algorithms are provided for a representative example network.