Hierarchical traffic grooming: A tutorial

Traffic grooming is concerned with the design, operation, and control of networks with multigranular bandwidth demands. As the number of resources in a multigranular network increases rapidly with the network size, wavelength capacity, and load, a scalable framework for managing these entities becomes essential. Hierarchical traffic grooming facilitates the control and management of multigranular WDM networks. In this paper, we present a survey of traffic grooming schemes for optical networks that make use of architectures, algorithms and design techniques that impose a hierarchical structure on the network topology.