Traffic Grooming: Combinatorial Results and Practical Resolutions.

In an optical network using the wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology, routing a request consists in assigning it a route in the physical network and a wavelength. If each request uses $1/g$ of the bandwidth of the wavelength, we will say that the grooming factor is $g$. That means that on a given edge of the network we can groom (group) at most $g$ requests on the same wavelength. With this constraint the objective can be either to minimize the number of wavelengths (related to the transmission cost) or minimize the number of Add Drop Multiplexers (shortly ADM) used in the network (related to the cost of the nodes). Here, we first survey the main theoretical results obtained for different grooming factors on various topologies: complexity, (in)approximability, optimal constructions, approximation algorithms, heuristics, etc. Then, we give an ILP formulation for multilayer traffic grooming and present some experimental results