A New Approach to Improving the Grooming Performance with Dynamic Traffic in SONET Rings

Traffic grooming is widely employed to minimize the number of ADM's in today's WDM rings to reduce the total cost of the network. Since traffic often changes over time, the problem of grooming dynamic traffic becomes more and more important. In this paper, we use the technique of splitting traffic to the grooming of arbitrary dynamically changed traffic in a strictly non-blocking way in SONET/WDM rings. Two splitting methods: traffic-cutting and traffic-dividing are introduced, and the third method, dividing a traffic first and then cutting it, is also proposed. The grooming performance for static and dynamic traffic with these three methods is analyzed in detail. A genetic algorithm (GA) based on these methods is proposed. Computer simulation results under different conditions show that our algorithm is efficient in reducing both the numbers of ADM's and wavelengths required. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.