Traffic Grooming on the Path

International audienceIn a WDM network, routing a request consists in assigning it a route in the physical network and a wavelength. If each request uses at most 1/C of the bandwidth of the wavelength, we will say that the grooming factor is C . That means that on a given edge of the network we can groom (group) at most C requests on the same wavelength. With this constraint the ob jective can be either to minimize the number of wavelengths (related to the transmission cost) or minimize the number of Add Drop Multiplexer (shortly ADM) used in the network (related to the cost of the nodes). Here we consider the case where the network is a path on N nodes, PN . Thus the routing is unique. For a given grooming factor C minimizing the number of wavelengths is an easy problem, well known and related to the load problem. But minimizing the number of ADM's is NP-complete for a general set of requests and no results are known. Here we show how to model the problem as a graph partition problem and using tools of design theory we completely solve the case where C = 2 and where we have a static uniform all-to-all traffic (requests being all pairs of vertices)