Traffic grooming in unidirectional WDM ring networks using design theory

We address the problem of traffic grooming in WDM rings with all-to-all uniform unitary traffic. We want to minimize the total number of SONET add-drop multiplexers (ADMs) required. We show that this problem corresponds to a partition of the edges of the complete graph into subgraphs, where each subgraph has at most C edges (where C is the grooming ratio) and where the total number of vertices has to be minimized. Using tools of graph and design theory, we optimally solve the problem for practical values and infinite congruence classes of values for a given C, and thus improve and unify all the preceding results. We disprove a conjecture of [A.L. Chiu and E.H. Modiano, 2000] saying that the minimum number of ADMs cannot be achieved with the minimum number of wavelengths and also another conjecture of [J.Q. Hu, 2002].