A genetic algorithm based approach for traffic grooming, routing and wavelength assignment in optical WDM mesh networks

In wavelength routed optical networks, each optical link is capable of carrying traffic using several wavelengths and each wavelength as well as lightpath support traffic in the Gbps range. On the other hand, the traffic requested by individual connection is still in the Mbps range. Therefore, to utilize the network resources (bandwidth, transceivers, etc.) effectively, several low-speed traffic streams have to be efficiently groomed or multiplexed into a high-speed lightpath. In this work, we have investigated the traffic grooming problem with the objective of maximizing the network throughput for wavelength routed mesh networks. We have proposed an algorithm to handle general multi-hop static traffic grooming based on genetic algorithm. The efficacy of our approach has been established through extensive simulation on different sets of traffic demands under different network topologies and compared with an efficient heuristics proposed in the literature.