Novel path computation element-based traffic grooming strategy in internet protocol over wavelength division multiplexing networks

With the emergence of various broadband services, a lot of bandwidth fragments will be generated during the operation of services being mapped into optical channels, which will waste too many bandwidth resources and decrease the transmission performance of optical networks. Traffic grooming strategy in dynamic optical networks can optimise the utilisation of bandwidth resources and reduce the blocking probability. However, in the distributed control plane of automated switched optical networks, all the traffic grooming strategies are implemented in each control node, and resource collision will still occur because the same link resource may be used by two path computation requests or traffic engineering information flooded by open shortest path first-traffic engineering protocol may be not synchronous at each control node or signalling delay time is too long. To reduce the collision of resource, a unified control plane is designed based on path computation element (PCE) for Internet protocol over wavelength division multiplexing networks, and a novel PCE-based traffic grooming strategy is proposed in the framework of unified control plane. Based on this strategy, four PCE-based traffic grooming algorithms are proposed and compared with the distributed traffic grooming strategy without PCE on a simulation platform implemented using disperse event simulation tool OMNET++.