Traffic grooming in light trail networks

Abstract

In today's WDM networks the dominating cost factor is the number of transceivers. Light trails have been shown to reduce the total number of wavelengths, however not necessarily the number of transceivers used in the network. Within this paper we explain two mechanisms that deal with reducing the total number of transceivers in light trail networks. While the first method - 'tune in' light trails (TILT) - ensures that this number is at most the one of a corresponding lightpath network, traffic grooming can be applied in light trail networks as well to reduce the number of transceivers even further. Simulation results show that the TILT network has much better performance than the traditional counterpart, especially when the number of transceivers in the network is limited. Also the light trail network with grooming has better performance than that without grooming