Dynamic traffic grooming in optical WDM mesh networks with distributed control

Wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) is the promising technology to meet the rapid growth of Internet traffic. The next-generation optical WDM networks will have the capability of real-time provisioning of network capacity, providing interoperability between different optical and electronic networks, etc. An unified control plane that incorporates these desirable features is being designed and developed. Traffic grooming is a very important problem whose solution will enable us to fully develop such a control plane for next-generation optical networks. In this work, we study the network architectures for grooming-capable WDM networks and propose a routing algorithm that enables a WDM network to support dynamic grooming of traffic streams of different capacity granularities. Network performance, based on various node architectures, is investigated via simulations.