On path-level traffic grooming strategies in WDM metro optical networks

This article provides an overview of some of the optical grooming (aggregation) techniques that have been developed recently with IP as the client layer. We identify four kinds of aggregation strategies: point to point (P2P), point to multipoint (P2MP), multipoint to point (MP2P), and multipoint to multipoint (MP2MP). Using an auxiliary graph-based model, we evaluate the performance of these four strategies for singlehop and multihop scenarios that aggregate at the path level. In the case of partial mesh networks with dynamic traffic, we observe the following: MP2MP outperforms other architectures by multiple orders of magnitude in single-hop scenarios; P2P performs best in multihop transceiver-constrained scenarios; and P2MP performs the best in multihop wavelength-constrained scenarios.