Minimal Delay Traffic Grooming in WDM Optical Star Networks

Abstract

All-optical networks face the challenge of reducing slower opto-electronic conversions by managing assignment of traffic streams to wavelengths in an intelligent manner, while maximizing the bandwidth resources utilization. This challenge becomes harder in networks closer to the end users that have insufficient data to saturate single wavelengths as well as traffic streams outnumbering the usable wavelengths. Traffic grooming has been proposed as a possible solution in the network closer to the end users. However, it requires costly traffic analysis at access nodes. We study the problem of traffic grooming that reduces the need to analyze traffic, for a class of network architecture mostly used by Metropolitan Area Networks; the star network. We first prove that the problem is NP-hard, then provide an efficient greedy heuristics that can be used to intelligently groom traffics at the LANs to reduce latency at the access nodes. Simulation results show that our greedy heuristics achieves a near-optimal solution.