Survivable impairment-aware traffic grooming

Traffic grooming allows efficient utilization of network capacity by aggregating several independent traffic streams into a wavelength. In addition, survivability and impairment-awareness (i.e., taking into account the effect of physical impairments) are two important issues that have gained a lot of research interest in the area of optical networks. In this paper, we consider the survivable impairment-aware traffic grooming problem in Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) optical networks, where the objective is to minimize the cost of traffic grooming and regeneration. Our approach to solve this problem is shown, using data obtained from a realistic network, to significantly outperform a sequential approach, which is usually used by practitioners.