Traffic grooming in mesh WDM optical networks - performance analysis

Traffic grooming is an important task in interworking between the wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) optical network that supplies "pipes" at the wavelength granularity, and the attached client networks that usually require connections of subwavelength granularity. The focus of this paper is to conduct performance analysis of grooming dynamic client traffic in WDM optical networks with a mesh topology. This paper first briefly introduces the traffic grooming problem in WDM optical networks and the issues related to performance analysis. It then develops two link blocking models, an exact model based on the stochastic knapsack problem and an approximation model based on an approximate continuous time Markov chain (CTMC). The end-to-end performance analysis is conducted using the reduced load approximation. The result obtained from analysis is shown to be accurate compared with the numerical result obtained from simulation.