Research problems in dynamic traffic grooming in optical networks

Traffic grooming has recently emerged as an important area in wide area wavelength-routed optical networks re-search. This research area addresses the problem of mul-tiplexing lower rate traffic demands into wavelength chan-nels of high bandwidth, so as to reduce network equipment cost by maximizing the optical (wavelength) routing and minimizing electronic routing. Recently, there have been efforts to extend studies of this kind to cases of dynamic traffic. However, this area is still comparatively new, and most of the proposed approaches ignore the optical routing maximization aspect in favor of simply considering block-ing probability. In this position paper, we describe a range of problems that we consider appropriate for consideration under the umbrella of dynamic grooming, and show what the various dimensions are along which various flavors of this class of problems may be found. We provide some sam-ple formulations describing some of these problems pre-cisely.