A novel grooming algorithm with the adaptive weight and load balancing for dynamic holding-time-aware traffic in optical networks

•This paper proposed a new grooming algorithm in IP over WDM network.•The algorithm takes comprehensive and careful considerations of the link weight.•The algorithm can use resources more efficiently and achieve load balancing.

To maximize the resource utilization of optical networks, the dynamic traffic grooming, which could efficiently multiplex many low-speed services arriving dynamically onto high-capacity optical channels, has been studied extensively and used widely. However, the link weights in the existing research works can be improved since they do not adapt to the network status and load well. By exploiting the information on the holding times of the preexisting and new lightpaths, and the requested bandwidth of a user service, this paper proposes a grooming algorithm using Adaptively Weighted Links for Holding-Time-Aware (HTA) (abbreviated as AWL-HTA) traffic, especially in the setup process of new lightpath(s). Therefore, the proposed algorithm can not only establish a lightpath that uses network resource efficiently, but also achieve load balancing. In this paper, the key issues on the link weight assignment and procedure within the AWL-HTA are addressed in detail. Comprehensive simulation and experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has a much lower blocking ratio and latency than other existing algorithms.