Dynamic multicast traffic grooming in light-trail WDM optical mesh networks

A light trail in a WDM optical network is an optical communication channel that allows intermediate nodes to access the channel providing the flexibility for multiplexing traffic of multiple connections into the optical communication channel at intermediate nodes. The technique of multiplexing traffic of multiple connections into a single communication channel is known as traffic grooming. This paper studies the problem of dynamic multicast traffic grooming that deals with dynamically arriving and departing multicast connections in light-trail WDM optical networks. Our objective is to reduce blocking ratio. This paper proposes an auxiliary graph model for light-trail WDM optical networks that can be used for routing and traffic grooming purposes. Based on the auxiliary graph model, two dynamic multicast traffic grooming algorithms are studied. Compared with existing algorithms in the literature, the two algorithms yield significantly better performance.