Traffic Grooming for Optical Networks: Foundations, Techniques and Frontiers (Repost)

Traffic grooming is the name given to a family of optical network design problems that has attracted significant attention from both academia and industry in the last decade or so. The huge bandwidth of fiber optical networking is much larger than the typical bandwidth demands experienced by network service providers. This mismatch creates a need for multiplexing the low rate traffic demands into optical wavelength channels, but this requires costly electronic switching equipment, potentially offsetting the benefit of cheap optical transport.