A Manageable and Bandwidth Effective Solution for Traffic Grooming in IP-over-WDM Networks

Traffic grooming can be used in IP-over-WDM networks to efficiently utilize the bandwidth of wavelength channels. In grooming networks, however, the number of lightpaths that need to be managed is high and empty time-slots may be switched together with time-slots taken by traffic. These empty time-slots add an induced connectivity to the network and, to use this induced bandwidth, quite complex induced topologies need to be managed, increasing the computation time. In this paper we present an approach to efficiently use the induced bandwidth while alleviating the management of complex topologies. A network operating dynamically is used to test the effectiveness of such approach.