QoS aware traffic grooming and integrated routing on IP over WDM networks

In this article, we consider traffic grooming and integrated routing in IP over WDM networks. The challenges of this problem come from jointly considering traffic grooming, IP routing, and lightpath routing and wavelength assignment (RWA). Due to the high bandwidth of optical fiber, there exists a mismatch between the capacity needed by an IP flow and that provided by a single lightpath. Traffic grooming is therefore used to increase the network utilization by aggregating multiple IP flows in a single lightpath. However, traffic grooming incurs additional delays that might violate Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements of IP users. In this work, the tradeoff between traffic grooming and IP QoS routing is well-formulated as a mixed integer and linear optimization problem, in which the revenue from successfully provisioning IP paths is to be maximized. Problem constraints include IP QoS, routing, optical RWA, and the WDM network capacity. We propose a novel Lagrangean relaxation (LGR) algorithm to perform constraint relaxation and derive a set of subproblems. The Lagrangean multipliers are used in the proposed algorithm to obtain a solution in consideration of grooming advantage and resource constraints simultaneously. Through numerical experiments and comparisons between the proposed algorithm and a two-phase approach, LGR outperforms the two-phase approach under all experimental cases. In particular, the improvement ratio becomes even more significant when the ratio of IP flow to the wavelength capacity is smaller.