On routing and aggregation of many-to-many sessions over green WDM optical networks

In a many-to-many session, a participant distributes and receives traffic flows to/from all others in the same session. It is desirable to achieve the high resource utilizations and low energy consumptions when we provision such sessions. In the Wavelength-Division-Multiplexing (WDM) optical network, traffic grooming has been widely applied as the key technology for the routing and aggregation of sessions due to the high resource utilizations. However, the current many-to-many grooming approaches, whether the lightpath circle or the hubbed light-tree, do not make effort on reducing energy consumptions of many-to-many sessions. In this paper, we formulate the “Green Routing and Aggregation of Many-to-Many Sessions (GRAMMS)” problem. For the problem solving, we propose a novel heuristic that applies a rational combination of lightpaths in green WDM optical networks. We further give an illustrative comparison between our heuristic and existing approaches in terms of energy savings. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that, compared to benchmark approaches, our heuristic can achieve much higher energy efficiency.