c ○ Imperial College Press METAHEURISTIC APPROACHES TO TRAFFIC GROOMING IN WDM OPTICAL NET.pdfVIP

International Journal of Computational Intelligence and Applications Vol. 5, No. 2 (2005) 231–249 c Imperial College Press METAHEURISTIC APPROACHES TO TRAFFIC GROOMING IN WDM OPTICAL NETWORKS YONG XU∗, SANCHO SALCEDO-SANZ† and XIN YAO‡ The Centre of Excellence for Research in Computational Intelligence and Applications (CERCIA) School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK ∗y.xu@cs.bham.ac.uk † sss@cs.bham.ac.uk ‡x.yao@cs.bham.ac.uk Received 12 November 2004 Revised 3 May 2005 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 unfor- tunately, 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 comprehen- sive 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. Keywords : WDM optical network; traffic grooming; genetic algorithm; tabu search; simulated annealing. 1. Introduction Wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM)