Dynamic Routing in WDM Grooming Networks

Traffic grooming in optical networks has gained significant importance in recent years due to the prevailing sub-wavelength traffic requirement of end-users. In this paper, a methodology for dynamic routing of fractional-wavelength traffic in WDM grooming networks is developed. To evaluate the performance of routing algorithms, a new performance metric that reflects the network utilization is also proposed. The performances of shortest-widest path, widest-shortest path, and available shortest path routing algorithms are evaluated on a class of WDM grooming networks by considering traffic of different capacity requirements. The effect of dispersity routing, where higher capacity requests are broken into multiple unit capacity requests, is also investigated. The most interesting counter-intuitive result that is observed is that increasing the grooming capability in a network could result in degrading the performance of the widest-shortest path algorithm.