Design and Provisioning of WDM Networks for Many-to-Many Traffic Grooming

A large number of network applications today allow several users to interact together using the many-to-many service mode. A many-to-many session consists of group of users (we refer to them as members), where each member transmits its traffic to all other members in the same group. We address the problem of designing and provisioning of WDM networks to support many-to-many traffic grooming. Our objective is to minimize the overall network cost which is dominated by the cost of transceivers and the number of wavelengths used. We consider three different WDM networks for this problem. One is the non-splitting network, where the nodes do not support optical splitting. The other two networks are the hubbed and the all-optical networks, where the nodes support optical splitting. In the hubbed network, all members in a session transmit their traffic to a designated hub node. Using the new technique of network coding, the hub then linearly combines the traffic units received and sends back to the members a set of linear combinations using light-tree(s). In the all-optical network, each member in a session transmits its traffic directly to all other members in the same session using a light-tree. A comprehensive comparison between the three networks reveals that each of the networks is a cost-effective choice for a certain range of traffic granularities.