Heuristics for Sparse Traffic Grooming in Dynamic WDM Optical Mesh Networks

Optical networks based on wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology offers the promise to satisfy the bandwidth requirement of the Internet infrastructure, and provide the bandwidth needs of future applications in the local and wide area networks. Traffic streams from users generally (in Mbps) have a data-rate that is far less than bandwidth of optical fibers (in Tbps) or that of a light-path in optical fibers. This mismatch of bandwidths between user needs and wavelength capacity makes it clear that some multiplexing should be done to use the wavelength capacity efficiently, which will result in reduction on the cost of line terminating equipment (LTE). Multiplexing low bandwidth traffic request onto high capacity wavelength channel is called as traffic grooming. As sparse grooming employs only a few grooming nodes in the network. Here, we present some heuristic algorithms to perform G-node selection and grooming in a WDM optical network using dynamic traffic along with load balancing. We show by our simulation results that network throughput almost as same as full grooming can be achieved using sparse grooming. We also compare the performance of the proposed algorithm with the earlier available approaches and our simulation results show that our algorithm outperforms the present approaches.