Dynamic Survivable Network Design for Path Level Traffic Grooming in WDM Optical Networks

Recent research has focused on designing new architectures and protocols for pure optical grooming without resorting to fast optical switching. This is achieved in three steps: (1) the circuit is configured in the form of a path or a tree (2) optical devices like couplers/splitters are used to allow a wavelength to aggregate traffic from multiple transmitters and/or receivers through one of the following means - point to point, point to multi-point, multi-point to point and multipoint to multi-point (3) an arbitration mechanism is provided to avoid contention among end users of the circuit. In this paper, we focus on design of mesh networks that aggregate traffic at the path level. We develop a shared, mixed protection algorithms for guaranteed survival from single link failures in the context of dynamic traffic for mesh networks. Based on our simulations on random graphs, we conclude that light-trails, that enable multi-point to multi-point aggregation, performs multiple orders of magnitude better than lightpaths that allow point to point aggregation.