Controlling Traffic Hops - A New Approach for Traffic Grooming in WDM Optical Networks

Traffic grooming is the scheme for efficiently utilizing the huge bandwidth of a lightpath in WDM optical networks. This scheme involves merging several user data streams of sub-wavelength granularity onto a high speed lightpath. The way traffic grooming is implemented, depends much on the objective of the network operator. For example, traffic grooming may be carried out with the objective of minimizing resources such as number of lightpaths and number of wavelengths, or it may be carried out to minimize traffic hops (delay). While most of the earlier works have proposed policies to minimize use of network resources, few have addressed issues related to traffic hops. In this paper we propose an efficient strategy for traffic grooming by controlling the number of traffic hops on the logical topology. Time complexity analysis shows that the proposed algorithm C-Hops runs in polynomial time. Performance comparisons with some well-known strategies show that algorithm C-Hops is not only capable of reducing the number of traffic hops, but can also substantially minimize resource consumption.