Traffic Grooming in Large Optical WDM Mesh Networks with Wavelength Conversion Capability

Dynamic traffic grooming in optical mesh networks is one of the most important and practical problems for designing WDM networks. Most of previous work solves it by applying the Dijsktra's algorithm on an auxiliary graph. Although those algorithms can give very good performance since they have a global view of the whole network, they are very time-consuming and thus cannot be applied in large networks. Therefore, we propose a heuristic algorithm to reduce the required computations by minimizing the size of the graph. We compare our algorithm with existing algorithms by extensive simulations in a typical 24-node mesh networks. The results demonstrate that our algorithm can significantly reduce the computational complexity, typically by a few tens times. Despite its simplification, our algorithm outperforms existing algorithms by large margins since it can easily avoid lightpaths that consume a large amount of network resources.