Dynamic survivable traffic grooming with effective load balancing in WDM all-optical mesh networks

Traffic grooming in WDM optical networks is a scheme for aggregating several low-speed traffic streams from users onto a high-speed lightpath. In such networks, an optical fiber carries a large number of lightpaths and each individual lightpath carries the traffic of a large number of connection requests. So the failure of a single fiber-link, even for a brief period in such networks is a serious event. Thus survivability of user connections is extremely important. Since the problem of survivable traffic grooming in WDM mesh networks is NP-Complete, we propose a polynomial-time heuristic HDSTG (Heuristic Dynamic Survivable Traffic Grooming) that can be effectively used for dynamic traffic grooming in WDM all-optical mesh networks. Our heuristic is designed to provide guaranteed survivability of connection requests for any single link failure. We also propose two strategies, which can be used for effective load balancing to improve dynamic survivable traffic grooming namely TGMHL (Traffic Grooming with Minimized Hops and Load) and TGML (Traffic Grooming with Minimized Load). Performance comparisons demonstrate that the proposed strategies are better for network cost reduction and throughput enhancement as well.