Traffic Grooming in WDM Mesh Networks: A Light-Trail Implementation

In this work, we study the problem of efficient traffic grooming using light-trail. In case of lightpath a complete wavelength is dedicated between source and destination node. Once a lightpath is set up, the entire wavelength is used exclusively by the source-destination node pair. Data cannot be transmitted or received by nodes along the lightpath except the starting and ending node. However, it is often observed that the bandwidth requirement in today's network is often varying and does not justify the need for allocating an entire wavelength for a single data transmission. Therefore, the wavelength capacity may be underutilized. Then the term light-trail came into existence, it was proposed to avoid the inability of intermediate nodes to use a connection wavelength. In this work, we have proposed a traffic grooming algorithm to maximize the network throughput for wavelength-routed mesh networks using static light-trail. The efficiency of our approach has been established through extensive simulation on different sets of traffic demands with different bandwidth granularities for different network topologies and compared the approach with existing algorithm.