Traffic grooming applied to network protection: throughput and grooming port cost analysis

The use of traffic grooming techniques for WDM network protection is analysed. This approach is shown to use network resources efficiently while providing fast recovery times and good scaling since protection is being provided at the optical layer. The maximum throughput and minimum grooming port cost problems are mathematically formulated and results compared with traditional WDM protection. The results show that the number of wavelengths can be reduced while keeping the number of grooming ports used by the traditional lightpath protection approach.