Design of optical WDM networks

In this paper we consider the traffic Grooming, Routing and Wavelength Assignment problem in optical WDM mesh networks. This is a network design problem which consists in grooming the demands in lightpaths, assigning a wavelength to each lightpath and routing the traffic on these lightpaths so that the total cost is minimum. We first give an Integer Linear Programming formulation for the problem. Then we discuss a preprocessing procedure for efficiently managing the existing resources of the network. We then propose a fast and effective heuristic for solving large and real instances of the problem. We finally provide an illustrative application of the proposed heuristic for a real backhaul network instance.