Waveband Grooming and IP Aggregation in Optical Networks

An automatically switched optical network (ASON) can be used as the transport layer of generalized multiprotocol label switching (GMPLS) networks. The design of an ASON involves determining the number of optical cross-connects (OXC) in the network, the required number of ports per OXC, and the interconnection topology of the OXCs. Given the number of ports per OXC, we present a linear algorithm to find the number of OXCs and to identify a cost-effective topology. We then develop a scheme that can be used to perform waveband grooming for several different topologies of an ASON that uses single-layer multigranular OXCs. We identify the bottlenecks and investigate the effect of traffic grooming schemes in the design of an ASON as a function of the peak access rate per customer. We evaluate the topologies and architectures for a national trunk network.