Survivable Multipath Traffic Grooming in Telecom Mesh Networks With Inverse Multiplexing

• Published in: Journal of optical communications and networking Vol. 2; no. 8; pp. 545 - 557
• Main Authors: Sheng Huang, Ming Xia, Martel, Chip, Mukherjee, Biswanath
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 01.08.2010; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Bandwidth; Finite element method; Inverse; Inverse multiplexing; Joints; Mesh networks; Multipath provisioning; Multiplexing; Networks; Next generation networking; Protection; SONET; Studies; Survivable traffic grooming; Synchronous digital hierarchy; Telecom mesh network; Telecommunication traffic; Telecommunications; Traffic control; Traffic engineering; Traffic flow; Virtual concatenation (VCAT); Wavelength division multiplexing; Wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM); WDM networks; Wireless networks
• ISSN: 1943-0620; 1943-0639
• DOI: 10.1364/JOCN.2.000545

We investigate the survivable traffic grooming problem with inverse multiplexing in telecommunication mesh networks employing next-generation SONET/SDH and WDM. With the support of virtual concatenation, a connection of any bandwidth can be provisioned as several subconnections (i.e., inverse multiplexed) over diverse paths. Therefore, it is important to efficiently groom and protect these low-speed subconnections onto high-capacity wavelength channels, considering the typical constraints. We propose and investigate the characteristics of survivable multipath traffic grooming with protection-at-connection and protection-at-lightpath levels for grooming connections with shared protection, subject to the constraints of the inverse-multiplexing factor, differential-delay constraint, and grooming ports. Since this problem is NP-complete, we propose effective heuristics using a novel analytical model. Our results show that (1) the network performance, in metrics of bandwidth blocking ratio and resource overbuild, can be notably improved by exploiting the inverse-multiplexing capability, (2) tight constraints have negative impact on performance, (3) protection-at-connection performs better in most cases of multipath provisioning when the constraints are not too tight, and (4) protection-at-lightpath achieves better performance when the number of grooming ports is moderate or small.