Leveraging multipath routing and traffic grooming for an efficient load balancing in optical networks

Optical networks can benefit from multipath routing by routing traffic over diverse fiber links to fulfill bandwidth requirements, balance network load and improve resource utilization. This paper focuses on the effectiveness of multipath routing on aggregating residual bandwidth of the established lightpaths using dynamic traffic grooming. An optimization model based on Integer Linear Programing (ILP) is formulated to leverage multipath routing and grooming to serve connection requests with known duration, in a scenario where the dynamic traffic can demand bandwidth either larger or smaller than a single wavelength capacity. The impact of a balancing policy, referred to as Holding Time Balancing (HTBalancing), on multipath routing with traffic grooming in optical networks is also investigated. Numerical results show that the proposed optimization model can achieve a lower bandwidth blocking and a better load balancing with HTBalancing policy, when compared with single path routing. The proposed relaxation algorithm can effectively find near optimal solutions, and be applied in realistic scenarios.