Genetic approach for traffic grooming, routing, and wavelength assignment in WDM optical networks with sparse grooming resources

In wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) all-optical networks, the size of a request stream may be less than the maximum capacity of a lightpath. To avoid assigning an entire lightpath to a small request, many researchers have looked at adding traffic grooming to the routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) problem. In this work, we consider the RWA problem with traffic grooming (GRWA) for mesh networks. The GRWA problem is NP-Complete since it is a generalization of the RWA problem which is known to be NP-Complete. While most of the previous work in this field focuses on optical networks without grooming or with full grooming capabilities, in this work we study networks with sparse traffic grooming and wavelength conversion resources. In this paper, we propose two novel heuristics that minimize the cost of the traffic grooming and wavelength conversion equipment used in optical network without hindering the network blocking performance. The strength of the proposed heuristics stems from their simplicity, applicability to large-scale networks, and efficiency compared to other heuristics proposed in the literature. The performance of our proposed heuristics is compared to that of other efficient heuristics proposed in the literature in terms of the total cost of traffic grooming and wavelength conversion devices used and the blocking performance of the network.