School of Computer Science Literature Review and Survey (0360-510, Fall 2006) Heuristics for Traffic Grooming in WDM Optical Networks with Shared Path Protection

The emergence of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology has significantly increased the transmission capacity of a link in today's optical networks. In WDM networks, the bandwidth request of a traffic stream is usually much lower than the capacity of a wavelength. Traffic grooming can aggregate low-rate connections onto high-capacity optical fibers to make an efficient use of the bandwidth and, also to increase the network throughput. In addition, since huge amount data can flow at a very high speed in a WDM optical network, survivability of such a network against any fault, especially, in the optical fiber link, is of prime concern. Survivable traffic grooming in WDM optical networks has become a topic that is gaining more and more research and commercial attention. In this paper we present a survey of recent research on traffic grooming in WDM optical networks. We have tried to review the research papers that are focused on survivable traffic grooming in WDM mesh networks with an emphasis on shared-path protection, which uses less network resources than dedicated-path protection.