Wavelength Converter Placement for Dynamic Traffic Grooming in Optical Networks

With the huge capacity, wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical networks are predominantly used as the transport infrastructure to carry inter-domain traffic for client networks. WDM optical networks offer wavelength granularity high-capacity optical connections, whereas client traffic flows are usually at sub-wavelength granularity. Traffic grooming in WDM optical networks refers to the aggregation of low-rate client traffic flows onto high-capacity optical connections. When client traffic randomly arrives/departs, it is called dynamic traffic grooming. This paper focuses on wavelength converter placement for dynamic traffic grooming in optical networks. We propose an adaptive traffic load based converter placement heuristic and also study several other heuristics. The numerical results indicate that the adaptive traffic load based heuristic can obtain a similar performance as the greedy heuristics, in both blocking probabilities and throughputs, with lower computation complexity.