Traffic grooming on general topology WDM networks

The authors consider the traffic grooming problem on general topology WDM networks. The problem is: given a set of t connections, their routes and the grooming factor g, find an optimal wavelength assignment and grooming such that the number of wavelengths required in the network is minimised. This problem is first formulated as an integer linear programming problem, and then a heuristic is proposed to solve it. The simulation results show that increasing the grooming factor can considerably decrease the number of wavelengths required in the system.