A time and cost efficient dynamic traffic grooming algorithm for optical mesh networks

Traffic grooming is an efficient technique to utilize network resources by packing low speed traffic streams onto a high speed lightpath. Since many existing traffic grooming algorithms still have very high complexities, and do not consider the costs paid for network systems; in this paper, we propose a time and cost efficient dynamic traffic grooming algorithm (TCGA). The novelty of this heuristic algorithm is that it can reduce the complexity by removing redundant nodes when constructing the reachability graph. Then, from the graph established, we propose the cost functions to determine the optimal grooming path for a new connection request with the minimum cost. The simulation results show that our algorithm has a lower complexity, while still ensuring a comparable blocking performance, compared with other existing approaches.