Reconfiguration of Sub-wavelength Groomed Wavelength Routed Optical Networks.

Telecommunication networks recently have seen a large increase in traffic demands, especially data traffic as compared to voice traffic. With the advances in fiber optics and wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical networking is the key to satisfy the data-driven bandwidth demand. These technologies enable simultaneous transmission of signals on separate high-speed channels at different wavelengths. While current technologies can provide such huge bandwidth, in order to utilize efficiently the capacity of each lightpath, a number of independent lower-rate traffic streams must be multiplexed into a single lightpath. This technique is referred to as traffic grooming. Another most attractive feature of WDM and wavelength routing networks is the possibility of adaptively creating virtual topologies, or a set of lightpaths, based on network need, giving rise to the concept of reconfiguration. Till date, however, there has been little or no work on the joint consideration of the two areas of traffic grooming and reconfiguration, even though it is clear that reconfiguration is at least equally important in the realistic networks of tomorrow which will definitely need to carry sub-wavelength traffic. This is probably due to two reasons: the common wisdom has been that the two aspects can be handled separately, and also it is hard to define reasonable network design goals if the two aspects are considered jointly. In this thesis, we examine this issu