Metaheuristic Approaches To Traffic Grooming In WDM Optical Networks

The widespread deployment of WDM optical networks posts lots of new challenges for network designers. Traffic grooming is one of the most common problems. Efficient grooming of traffic can effectively reduce the overall cost of the network. But unfortunately, traffic grooming problems have been shown to be NP-hard. Therefore, new heuristics must be devised to tackle them. Among these approaches, metaheuristics are among the most promising ones. In this paper, we present a thorough and comprehensive survey on various metaheuristic approaches to the grooming of traffic in both static and dynamic patterns in WDM optical networks. Some future challenges and research directions are also discussed in this paper.