Sparse grooming sites in all-optical networks

With the rapid advancements in wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) technology, the capacity of optical fibers is increasing considerably. Traffic streams from users generally have a data-rate that is far less than the bandwidth of optical fibers or that of a lightpath in optical fibers. Traffic grooming can be used to group the traffic streams from various users and match to the data-rate of a lightpath. Internet Protocol (IP) level traffic grooming requires electronic processing and can be done using backbone routers in an all-optical network. Unlike full grooming, in which each node is capable of grooming, sparse grooming employs only a few grooming nodes in the network. In this paper, we present a heuristic algorithm to perform sparse grooming in an all-optical network using backbone routers. We also identify the optimum number of places to perform the traffic grooming.