A fast heuristic for DWDM routing and grooming

Abstract

Due to the capacity granularities inherent to optical networks, routing and traffic grooming are complex problems in DWDM networks. Although algorithms, which are capable of finding (near) optimal solutions exist, they require significant computation time, thus severly limiting the grounds for a more interactive approach to network design or the ability to solve what-if scenarios quickly, which are capabilities in high-demand, by both solution vendors and operators. Therefore we propose a routing and grooming heuristic capable of finding solutions for medium-sized networks in less than 30 seconds on commodity hardware and compare the solutions found by an implementation of this heuristic to optimal results found in the literature.