Altering Grooming Decisions to Enhance p-Cycle Design Efficiency

In most prior work on survivable network design, lower level connection requirements are assumed to have already been "groomed" into a required set of lightpath demands. In this work, we show how grooming decisions can be directly integrated into an overall p-cycle network design for more efficiency. We use this new ability to understand how the number of grooming sites affects overall network efficiency and how grooming decisions can interact with the p-cycle protection strategy. In test case results a set of STM-1 demands are groomed into a set of STM-16 transport connections in a way that is jointly optimal considering both working path capacities and p-cycles formed to protect those paths. The study also compares different criteria for selecting grooming sites.