JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 33, NO.
1, JANUARY 1, 2015
Dynamic Traffic Grooming in Sliceable
Bandwidth-Variable Transponder-Enabled
Elastic Optical Networks
Jiawei Zhang, Yuefeng Ji, Mei Song, Yongli Zhao, Xiaosong Yu, Jie Zhang, and Biswanath Mukherjee, Fellow, IEEE
Abstract—Traffic grooming has evolved to present some new fea-
tures in sliceable bandwidth-variable transponder enabled elastic
optical networks (SBVT-EON). One of the new features is “optical
traffic grooming,” in which multiple optical flows from/to different
sources/destinations can be groomed onto a sliceable transpon-
der. When establishing a new connection request in SBVT-EON,
a key problem is how to coordinate electrical and optical traf-
fic grooming. In this study, we propose a three-layered auxiliary
graph (AG) model to address mixed-electrical-optical grooming
under dynamic traffic scenario. By adjusting the edge weights of
AG, we can achieve various traffic-grooming policies for different
purposes. Also, we propose two spectrum reservation schemes that
can efficiently utilize the capacity of a transponder. We compare
different traffic-grooming policies under two spectrum reservation
schemes, and a tradeoff is shown to exist among the policies. We
also evaluate their performances for different network topologies
with different resource provisions.
Index Terms—Auxiliary graph (AG), dynamic traffic groom-
ing, elastic optical networks (EONs), sliceable bandwidth-variable
transponder (SBVT-EON).
I. INTRODUCTION
PECTRALLY-EFFICIENT elastic optical network (EON)
S has emerged as the evolutionary technology to satisfy the
ever-increasing spectrum demand for next-generation optical
networks [1], [2]. EON redesigns the coarse wavelength di-
vision multiplexing (WDM) grid (e.g., 50 GHz) to finer fre-
quency slots (FSs) (e.g., 12.5 GHz), which leads to more flex-
ible spectrum-resource organization for the network operator.
FS is defined as the minimal granularity of spectrum range
in EON. Bandwidth-variable optical cross-connect (BV-OXC)
and bandwidth-variable transponder (BVT) are the key compo-
nents needed for EON [3]. To future improve the flexibility of
Manuscript received November 7, 2014; revised December 15, 2014; accepted
December 15, 2014. Date of publication January 8, 2015; date of current version
January 23, 2015. Parts of this work appeared in the proceedings of ECOC
2014, France. This work has been supported in parts by China’s 973 program
(2012CB315705), NSFC project (61372118), and Networks Lab at UC Davis,
CA, USA.
J. Zhang and M. Song are with the School of Electronic Engineering, Beijing
University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China (e-mail:
zhangjw1985@gmail.com; songm@bupt.edu.cn).
Y. Ji, Y. Zhao, X. Yu, and J. Zhang are with the State Key Laboratory
of Information Photonics and Optical Communication, Beijing University of
Posts and Telecommunication, Beijing 100876, China (e-mail: jyf@bupt.edu.cn;
yonglizhao@bupt.edu.cn; xiaosong.bupt@gmail.com; lgr24@bupt.edu.cn).
B. Mukherjee is with the Networks Lab at University of California, Davis,
CA 95616 USA (e-mail: bmukherjee@ucdavis.edu).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JLT.2014.2383444
0733-8724 © 2014 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
183
the optical network infrastructure, sliceable bandwidth-variable
transponder (SBVT) has been proposed as a physical transpon-
der that can be logically sliced into multiple sub-transponders
(or virtual transponders), and each sub-transponder can set up
an independent lightpath for a connection without electrical pro-
cessing at intermediate nodes [4], [5]. The benefit of SBVT is
that it can achieve efficient router bypass which leads to signif-
icant cost and energy savings [6]–[8].
A. Traffic-Grooming Evolution from WDM to SBVT-EON
Due to the variability of IP traffic demands and the coarse
granularity of optical networks, capacity mismatch exists be-
tween the bandwidths of the optical channel and upper-layer
traffic. Traffic grooming is an efficient method to improve the
resource utilization by aggregating multiple electrical channels
(packet or circuit flows) to an optical channel. Traffic groom-
ing enabled by electrical switching fabric is called electrical
traffic grooming, which can improve spectrum efficiency and
transponder usage. An example of traffic grooming with fixed-
grid WDM network is shown in Table I.
In EON, spectral resource can be allocated as just-enough
bandwidth to meet the traffic demands. However, traffic groom-
ing is still required for two reasons. First, BVT is usually de-
signed for maximal traffic rate in the network and cannot support
slice-ability in the very early stage [3]. To efficiently use the ca-
pacity of a transponder, electrical traffic grooming is applied in
bandwidth-variable transponder enabled elastic optical network
(BVT-EON). Second, a filter guard band between two adja-
cent elastic optical channels should be assigned for optical filter
consideration. Traffic grooming can save the filter guard bands
by aggregating traffic electrically. Traffic grooming with BVT-
EON is shown in Table I; note that electrical switching fabric
is still needed for traffic grooming, which is similar to WDM
network. The difference is that transponder does not strictly fol-
low the ITU-T central frequency, which can provide flex-optical
channel (e.g., OTUflex [4]).
To further improve the flexibility of optical networks and
eliminate the electrical processing, SBVT was designed for
EON. In SBVT-EON, traffic-grooming function can be partly
offloaded from electrical layer to optical layer. The mixed
electrical-optical grooming function in SBVT-EON is shown in
Table I. Multiple electrical channels can be “groomed” onto one
sub-transponder channel, where each sub-transponder channel is
associated with a flex-optical channel. Multiple sub-transponder
channels (flex-optical channels) can be “groomed” optically
onto one transponder by using optical switching fabric (e.g.,
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TABLE I
MODULATION SCHEMES FOR COMPARISON
BV-OXC), which was proposed as “optical traffic grooming”
[9].
In general, for all traffic-grooming paradigms which are men-
tioned above, traffic-grooming problem can be divided into two
sub-problems:
1) How to determine routing on a virtual topology (electrical
layer). The virtual topology consists a set of electrical
nodes (e.g., IP routers) and a set of existing lightpaths
whose capacity is fixed in WDM but flexible in EON.
2) How to determine routing and spectrum allocation (RSA)
in optical layer, which is an NP-hard problem. Spectrum
reservation for a lightpath is a new feature in EON be-
cause the spectrum is rigidly reserved when a lightpath is
established in the WDM network.
B. Related Works
There are many related works on the above-mentioned traffic-
grooming paradigms. For static traffic grooming in a WDM net-
work, the authors in [10] gave an integer linear program (ILP)
model to solve the two sub-problems jointly. This approach has
a potential to achieve better performance, but ILP is not scalable
for large topologies. One way to make the problem tractable is
to design heuristic algorithms to separate the sub-problems or
solve one connection request at a time [11], [12]. For dynamic
traffic grooming in a WDM network, Ref. [13] proposed vari-
ous dynamic traffic-grooming policies by constructing auxiliary
graphs (AGs) with different edge weights. It solved the dynamic
traffic-grooming problem by using a graph model.
In BVT-EON, traffic grooming was first proposed for a static
traffic scenario to save guard bands between two neighboring
lightpaths [14]. Spectrum allocation sub-problem is simplified
by ignoring spectrum-continuity and spectrum-contiguity con-
straints. As a network design problem, an OFDM-based optical-
grooming scheme was proposed in [15], aiming to eliminate
“O-E-O” conversions and electrical processing. The grooming
benefit is limited with respect to both spectrum and transponder
JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 33, NO. 1, JANUARY 1, 2015
utilization because traffic grooming is only executed at the
source node. For dynamic traffic grooming, the authors in [16]
extend the AG model to be implemented in BVT-EON. Based
on this, they also proposed a spectrum reservation scheme by
reserving more spectrum than the traffic demand when estab-
lishing a new lightpath.
C. Our Contributions
The problems of traffic grooming in SBVT-EON were stud-
ied in our previous work [7], [17]. We studied energy-efficient
traffic grooming with sliceable transponder, and compared three
different elastic optical transponders based on their slice-ability.
Significant power saving was achieved from the results of both
ILP and heuristic algorithms.
In this study, we focus on the dynamic traffic-grooming prob-
lem in SBVT-EON, and propose an AG to jointly consider elec-
trical and optical traffic grooming. The differences between our
AG and AGs which were proposed in [13] and [16] are as fol-
lows: first, we add a “sub-transponder layer” in the AG (see
Section II-A) for optical traffic grooming, so the optical and
electrical traffic grooming coordination can be processed by the
AG; and, second, we propose two spectrum reservation schemes
for multi-flow transponders to improve the transponder’s utiliza-
tion.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section II, AG
and spectrum reservation schemes are proposed. In Section III,
traffic-grooming policies based on AG are proposed for different
objectives. In Section IV, simulation results are presented to
compare the performance of various traffic-grooming policies.
Section V concludes the paper.
II. DYNAMIC TRAFFIC GROOMING IN SBVT-EON
Traffic patterns induced by emerging services such as cloud
computing, big-data applications and content delivery in data-
center networks require a transport network to support dynamic
ZHANG et al.: DYNAMIC TRAFFIC GROOMING IN SLICEABLE BANDWIDTH-VARIABLE TRANSPONDER-ENABLED ELASTIC OPTICAL
Fig. 1. Auxiliary graph (AG).
connection setup and release. The flexibility enabled by the
EON makes it more suitable for dynamic traffic than WDM
networks.
Suppose the network topology is defined as G = (V, E),
where V is a set of nodes with traffic-grooming capability and
E is set of bidirectional links. In dynamic traffic grooming, con-
nection requests arrive one a time, hold for certain duration,
and then depart. A connection request is expressed as r(s, d, b),
where s and d denote its source and destination nodes, and b is
the requested bandwidth in term of FSs. When request r arrives,
the control plane decides how to route r through a combina-
tion of existing lightpaths (sub-problem 1) and new lightpaths
(sub-problem 2). The new lightpath can be established by two
operations: by using an existing transmitter or receiver (opti-
cal traffic grooming) to setup a new lightpath, or by using a
new transmitter or receiver to setup a new lightpath. Below, we
show how to use AG to coordinate electrical and optical traffic
grooming.
A. Auxiliary Graph (AG)
An AG was first proposed in WDM networks [13] and
then evolved in EONs with non-sliceable bandwidth variable
transponders [16]. It is more complex in SBVT-EON, because
“optical traffic grooming” is introduced to the model.
Fig. 1 shows an AG example for a 3-node physical topol-
ogy [see Fig. 1(a)]. We have three layers in the model—
Electrical layer, Sub-transponder layer (flex-optical layer),
and Transponder layer—and the granularity of a layer is in-
creasing from top of the model to bottom. In electrical layer,
the nodes represent abstracted electrical router or switch. In
sub-transponder layer, nodes represent abstracted sub-Tx/Rx.
In transponder layer, nodes represent abstracted Tx/Rx. Be-
tween the nodes, there are four kinds of directed edges in
the AG: Tx/Rx edge, Sub-Tx/Rx edge, Existing lightpath edge,
and Potential lightpath edge. There is a Tx/Rx edge between
electrical layer and transponder layer if there is an “unused”
185
Tx/Rx in the physical node. Similarly, there is a Sub-Tx/Rx
edge between electrical layer and sub-transponder layer if there
is an “unused” sub-Tx/Rx which belongs to a “used” Tx/Rx.
There is an existing lightpath edge between nodes in electrical
layer if there is a lightpath already existing in the network, and
it has enough capacity to accommodate a new connection. Po-
tential lightpath edge represents if a lightpath (with contiguous
and continuous spectral resource) can be established by a pair of
Sub-Tx/Rx and Tx/Rx. There are three kinds of potential light-
path edges which connect the nodes in sub-transponder layer,
transponder layer, and in between the two layers. We use K-
Shortest-Path (KSP) and First Fit (FF) for RSA scheme to find a
set of potential lightpaths, then we choose the shortest available
one among the K paths as the potential lightpath edge.
An AG is constructed each time a new connection request
arrives, so the edges appearing in the AG should satisfy the
connection requirements such as bandwidth. For example, in
Fig. 1(b), there is no Tx edge for nodes 1 and 2 because sliceable
transmitters are not available in nodes 1 and 2. An example route
for a connection from node 1 to node 3 is shown in Fig. 1(b).
For path 1 to 2, connection is accommodated by optical traffic
grooming, and for path 2 to 3, connection is accommodated by
electrical traffic grooming.
B. Spectrum Reservation (SR) Schemes
Although the transponder is flexible and sliceable, the ca-
pacity mismatch between electrical and optical channels still
exists in a multi-layer optical transport network. This gap can
be filled by electrical traffic grooming. In addition, electrical
traffic grooming is also required for cost and energy saving in
SBVT-EON, especially for a transponder with low slice-ability
[7]. Consequently, when establishing a new lightpath, we need
to reserve more spectrum for electrical traffic grooming.
The spectrum reservation occurs when an electrical chan-
nel cannot fully fill a sub-transponder’s working channel. The
capacity of a sub-transponder’s working channel depends on
the number of sub-transponders of a sliceable transponder as
well as the transponder’s full capacity. Let the number of sub-
transponders be represented as N and the capacity of a transpon-
der be C in term of number of sub-carriers. Thus, the capac-
ity of sub-transponder’s working channel is C/N , e.g., if
a sliceable transponder with ten sub-carriers (C = 10) has two
sub-transponders (N = 2), its sub-transponder’s working chan-
nel has five sub-carriers. Here, we define the capacity of sub-
transponder’s working channel in terms of sub-carriers, and not
data rate because each sub-transponder should be distinguished
with others by optical-layer characteristics such as frequency.
When a sub-transponder is the last unused sub-transponder
in a sliceable transponder, we reserve the maximal available
transponder resource (the rest of the capacity of the transpon-
der) for the sub-transponder.
To improve transponder utilization, we propose two spectrum
reservation schemes. The first is called spectrum reservation for
each lightpath (SRLP) where we reserve a sub-transponder’s
working channel for each new lightpath, which is similar to the
spectrum reservation scheme in [16].
186
The second scheme is called spectrum reservation for each
node-pair (SRNP). Different from SRLP, SRNP only makes one
lightpath reservation for each node-pair in the physical topol-
ogy. The following lightpaths with the same node-pair are not
reserved until the capacity of the reserved lightpath is fully
used. When the reserved lightpath is fully filled with other con-
nections or torn down, the next lightpath between the same
node-pair should be reserved for future connections. SRNP can
efficiently utilize a transponder’s slice-ability and save more
spectral resource.
Algorithm 1: Dynamic Traffic-Grooming Algorithm based
on AG
1: WHEN a connection request r(s, d, b) arrives:
2: Construct the AG and assign corresponding weights to
the edges according to different traffic-grooming
policies.
3: Run Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm between the two
electrical layer nodes corresponding to s and d.
4: IF no path is found THEN
5: Block the connection request.
6: ELSE
7: Route r according to the path found:
8: IF the path contains Tx/Rx edge or Sub-Tx/Rx edge,
and a Potential lightpath edge which connects
between them. THEN
9: Establish a new lightpath(s) according to the
route(s) and spectrum assignment to the
potential lightpath edges.
10: END IF
11: IF path contains Existing lightpath edge(s). THEN
12: Route the request along corresponding existing
lightpath(s) by allocating more FSs to increase
their bandwidth.
13: END IF
14: Update the transponder status (e.g., the capacity of
transponder and the number of available
sub-transponders) and virtual link status (e.g., the
capacity of existing lightpaths).
15: END IF
16: WHEN a connection terminates:
17: Tear down all the lightpaths that carry no traffic.
18: Update transponder status and virtual link status.
C. General Dynamic Traffic-Grooming Algorithm
The general dynamic traffic-grooming algorithm based on the
three-layered AG is described in Algorithm 1. When a connec-
tion request r(s, d, b) arrives, AG is constructed according to the
current network state and r‘s bandwidth b. The edges appearing
in AG should satisfy the bandwidth requirement of r. Then, we
can assign edge weights depending on different traffic-grooming
policies (see Section III). After the graph is constructed, we run
Dijkstra’s algorithm to find a path which connects source (s) and
destination node (d). If a path cannot be found, then we block
the connection. The route which is selected probably has two
JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 33, NO. 1, JANUARY 1, 2015
parts. If the route contains Tx/Rx edge or sub-Tx/Rx edge and
a potential lightpath edge, it means that we have to setup a new
lightpath by using transponder or sub-transponder. Then, we
change the lightpath from “potential” to “existing” according
to the RSA scheme. Note that this spectrum reservation hap-
pens when we establish a potential lightpath. If the route con-
tains an existing lightpath edge, it means we have to “groom”
the connection onto an existing lightpath by allocating the re-
served spectrum to the connection. After establishing a new
lightpath or allocating more spectrum to the existing lightpath,
we update the corresponding status of transponders and existing
lightpaths.
The time complexity of the algorithm is analyzed as fol-
lows. For constructing the AG, O(T |V |) is time complexity to
find transponder/ sub-transponder edges, where T represents the
number of transponders in a physical node. O(|V |2 ) is the time
complexity to find existing lightpath edges. The maximal num-
ber of potential lightpath edges in AG is 3|V |(|V | − 1). Because
we use KSP to find a potential lightpath edge, so the complexity
of finding potential lightpath edges is O(K|V |(|V | − 1)∗ (|E| +
|V | log |V |)). Thus, the total time complexity of constructing an
AG is O(T |V | + |V |2 + K|V |(|V | − 1)∗ (|E| + |V | log |V |)).
For running Dijkstra algorithm on AG, the number of nodes
in AG is 5|V |. The maximal number of edges in AG is 4T |V | +
4|V |(|V | − 1). Thus, the time complexity of running Dijkstra
on AG is O(T |V | + |V |(|V | − 1) + |V | log 5|V |).
III. DYNAMIC TRAFFIC-GROOMING POLICIES
Traffic-grooming policy determines how to accommodate a
connection according to the intention of the network operator
(e.g., minimize number of used transponder, minimize blocking
ratio, minimize energy consumption, etc.). Different groom-
ing policies can be achieved by adjusting the edge weights on
the AG. In this section, we implement four kinds of traffic-
grooming policies which were also considered by some previous
works.
Maximal Optical Grooming (MOG) and Maximal
Electrical Grooming (MEG) are proposed to minimize
the number of newly-established lightpaths [7]. The weight of
Tx/Rx edge is much larger than the weight of existing lightpath
edge and potential lightpath edge. All the three weights are
much larger than Sub-Tx/Rx edge. In MOG, the weight of
existing lightpath edge is larger than potential lightpath, so a
connection prefers to choose optical traffic grooming.
Minimal number of Virtual Hops (MVH) aims to minimize
the number of virtual hops the new connection goes through
to reduce the number of “O-E-O” conversions [13], [16]. The
weight of a Tx/Rx edge equals Sub-Tx/Rx edge and is half of
an existing lightpath edge. All the three weights are much large
than potential lightpath edge.
Minimal number of Physical Hops (MPH) is proposed to
minimize the number of physical hops [13], [16]. The weights
of existing lightpath edge and potential lightpath edge are
much larger than Rx/Tx and Sub-Tx/Rx edge. The weight of
Rx/Tx is larger than Sub-Tx/Rx edge for transponder utilization
consideration.
ZHANG et al.: DYNAMIC TRAFFIC GROOMING IN SLICEABLE BANDWIDTH-VARIABLE TRANSPONDER-ENABLED ELASTIC OPTICAL 187

TABLE II
WEIGHT-ASSIGNMENT SCHEMES

Rx/Tx edge Sub-Rx/Tx edge Existing LP edge Potential LP edge

∗
MOG 100 0.001 0.09 H 0.01∗ H
MEG 100 0.001 0.01∗ H 0.09∗ H
MVH 50 50 100 + 0.01∗ H 0.01∗ H
MPH 0.1 0.01 10∗ H 10∗ H

Fig. 4. Bandwidth blocking ratio (BBR) (NSFNET).

according to the definition. The number of sliceable transpon-

Fig. 2. 14-node NSFNET. ders per node is first assumed to be 15. We use KSP and FF for
RSA scheme to find a potential lightpath edge in the AG, where
K is 3 for our simulations. Connection requests follow a Pois-
son process, and are unidirectional and uniformly-distributed
among all node-pairs. Simulation results are shown below, and
each data point in the figures is averaged over 106 connection
requests.

Fig. 3. 24-node USNET.
The weight-assignment schemes for the above grooming po-
lices are listed in Table II, where H represents the number of
physical hops along the path.
IV. ILLUSTRATIVE NUMERICAL EXAMPLES
In this section, we compare different traffic-grooming poli-
cies under two spectrum reservations in many aspects. We also
evaluate their performance for different network topologies with
different resource provisions. The 14-node NSFNET (see Fig. 2)
and 24-node USNET (see Fig. 3) are employed in this study. All
nodes are capable of traffic grooming. Each link is bidirectional
(with two unidirectional fibers). The granularity of FS is 25 GHz
with the total FSs in each fiber is first assumed to be 300. The
guard band between two adjacent lightpaths is assumed to be 1
slot (25 GHz). There are four types of connection requests: 40,
100, 200, and 400 Gbps, with their proportion being 6:10:3:1.
We consider 400 Gbps sliceable optical transponder which can
launch 10 sub-carriers (a sub-carrier is associated to a FS), and
each sub-carrier can carry a 40-Gbps signal with a quadrature
phase-shift keying modulation format. Each sliceable transpon-
der can be sliced into three sub-transponders. The capacity
of a sub-transponder’s working channel is four sub-carriers
A. NSFNET
We compare four traffic-grooming policies in the following
aspects under NSFNET topology.
1) Bandwidth Blocking Ratio (BBR) vs. Traffic Load: BBR
can reflect spectrum efficiency which is an important property
for the network operator to consider. Fig. 4 shows BBR perfor-
mance of all the traffic-grooming policies under various traffic
loads. From the simulation results, we observe that SRNP-based
traffic-grooming policies achieve better BBR performance than
SRLP-based. That is because the number of direct lightpaths be-
tween node-pairs is more than before due to the effect of slice-
able transponder. SRNP can efficiently use spectral resource
by reserving spectrum for only one lightpath (fewer resource)
between a node-pair while SRLP makes reservation for all
lightpaths between the same node-pair. Significant spectral uti-
lization improvement is achieved by efficiently using a transpon-
der’s slice-ability.
We also observe that MPH-SRNP has the lowest BBR per-
formance followed by MVH-SRNP, MOG-SRNP, and MEG-
SRNP. This is because MPH can use optical traffic grooming to
improve transponder utilization; also a connection goes through
fewer physical hops (fiber links) on average under MPH, so it
consumes fewer spectral resources, which lead to lower BBR
than others.
2) Average Number of Used Transponders per Connection
vs. Traffic Load: The number of used transponder can reflect
networking cost, since both optical transponder and IP port are
big energy consumers and expensive relative to cheaper spectral
resource. Fig. 5 shows the number of used transponders per con-
nection under various traffic loads. We observe that MOG and
188
Fig. 5. Average number of transponders per request (NSFNET).
Fig. 6. Average number of virtual hops per request (NSFNET).
MEG have better performance on transponder utilization than
MVH and MPH. That is because they are designed to minimize
the number of newly-established lightpaths by both electrical
and optical traffic grooming, which leads to fewer transponders
used by connections. MEG is slightly better than MOG because
MOG is limited by the transponder slice-ability (i.e., number of
sub-transponders) while MEG can groom the connections to any
available reserved lightpaths. Sliceable transponder with differ-
ent transponder slice-ability is studied in our previous work [7].
As expected, SRNP-based traffic-grooming policies save
more transponders than SRLP-based policies. This is because
SRLP-based policies reserve more transponder resource than
SRNP-based ones, which leads to wastage of transponder.
We observe that the number of used transponders per con-
nection is below 1 according to Fig. 5. This is because of
transponder slice-ability so that multiple connections can share a
transponder.
3) Average Number of Virtual Hops per Connection vs. Traffic
Load: The number of virtual hops indicates how many “O-E-O”
conversions and electric processing are applied to connections,
which is a major factor that results in high end-to-end latency.
Fig. 6 illustrates average number of virtual hops per connec-
tion under various traffic loads. As we can see, MVH and MPH
JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 33, NO. 1, JANUARY 1, 2015
Fig. 7. Average number of physical hops per request (NSFNET).
outperform MEG and MOG because MEG and MOG are de-
signed to “groom” connections to existing lightpaths or potential
lightpaths. MEG has the worst performance on virtual hops be-
cause it would rather traverse multiple existing lightpaths than
other policies. We also observe that MVH and MPH have very
close performance which is around one virtual hop per con-
nection. This means that most connections in MVH and MPH
are using optical traffic grooming to establish a direct lightpath
between node-pairs, so not only the shortest virtual path, but
also the shortest physical path are achieved. This is why the
performance of MPH is almost the same as MVH.
SRNP-based polices get fewer virtual hops than correspond-
ing SRLP-based policies, especially for MOG and MEG. This is
because SRNP-based policies can efficiently utilize a transpon-
der’s slice-ability which means most connections can be es-
tablished by sub-transponders using direct lightpaths between
node-pairs (fewer virtual hops). However, for MVH and MPH,
the performances of the two SR schemes are almost the same.
This is because, in case of small topology, MVH and MPH
try to establish a direct lightpath by sub-transponders, which
leads to most node-pairs being connected by one virtual hop.
So, future connections are groomed with one virtual hop by ei-
ther optical traffic grooming or electrical traffic grooming. This
phenomenon will be changed by using a larger topology (see
Section IV-B).
4) Average Number of Physical Hops per Connection vs. Traf-
fic Load: The number of physical hops reflects spectral resource
utilization. Network operator may prefer the connections going
through the fewest fiber links so they can save spectral resource
and reduce latency. Fig. 7 illustrates the average number of
physical hops under various traffic loads. As mentioned above,
MPH achieves the fewest physical hops among the various poli-
cies because it is designed to minimize the number of physical
hops. MVH has almost the same performance as MPH because
the fewest virtual hops enabled by optical traffic grooming can
also achieve fewest physical hops. MEG and MOG have longer
physical hops because of their grooming feature so that they
traverse multiple exiting lightpaths.
We also find that SRNP-based traffic grooming policies go
through less physical hops than SRLP-based ones. This is
ZHANG et al.: DYNAMIC TRAFFIC GROOMING IN SLICEABLE BANDWIDTH-VARIABLE TRANSPONDER-ENABLED ELASTIC OPTICAL
Fig. 8. Bandwidth blocking ratio (BBR) (USNET).
Fig. 9. Average number of transponder per request (USNET).
because SRNP-based policies can save more spectral resources
than SRLP-based ones, which means SRNP-based policies have
more opportunities to choose the shortest path. For MVH and
MPH, the performance of the two SR schemes are almost the
same because of the small topology. This will be changed by
using a larger topology.
B. USNET
To investigate the performance of various traffic-grooming
polices in a larger topology, the 24-node USNET (see Fig. 3)
is employed. The other simulation parameters are the same as
NSFNET. As we can observe from Figs. 8–11, the curves’ trends
among different polices are similar to the results of NSFNET.
In Figs. 10 and 11, we find that SRNP-based polices outperform
SRLP-based polices in the large topology. In addition, as the traf-
fic load increases, the number of physical hops and virtual hops
increase. This is also due to the larger topology which results
in more virtual and physical hops. The tradeoff among different
traffic-grooming policies is that MOG and MEG achieve fewer
used transponders per connection but higher BBR than MVH
and MPH.
189
Fig. 10. Average number of virtual hops per request (USNET).
Fig. 11. Average number of physical hops per request (USNET).
C. Different Resource Provisions of Simulation
In this sub-section, we compare MEG and MOG under two
resource-provisioning situations. The first one is spectrum over
provision, which means spectral resource is relative larger than
transponder resource. The other one is transponder over provi-
sion (ToP), which means transponder resource is relative larger
than spectral resource. Figs. 12 and 13 show the BBR perfor-
mance in different topologies. As we can see from the results,
MOG has better BBR performance than MEG when spectral re-
source is over-provided. However, the performance is reversed
for ToP. This is because MEG can save more guard bands to
accommodate more connections than MOG when spectral re-
source is a limitation.
D. Average Run Time vs. Traffic Load
To investigate the performance of run time of the algorithm,
we iterated the algorithm 106 times on a machine with 3.60 GHz
processor (Intel Core i7–4790) and 8 GB RAM. Fig. 14 shows
the average run time under various traffic loads in different
topologies. As we analyzed in Section II-C, time complexity
190 JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 33, NO. 1, JANUARY 1, 2015

of the algorithm depends on two parts: constructing AG and

running Dijkstra algorithm on AG. Both of them are related to
the scale of topology, so USNET has a longer run time than
NSFNET. We also find that run time increases as traffic load
increases. This is because more existing lightpath edges appear
on AG when traffic load is heavy.

V. CONCLUSION
As an optical transport network evolves to a sliceable
transponder enable EON, traffic grooming presents new features
to accommodate upper-layer traffic. In this study, we first inves-
tigated the possible evolution of traffic grooming from WDM to
SBVT-EON, and mainly focused on dynamic traffic grooming
in SBVT-EON. A three-layered AG was proposed to coordinate
Fig. 12. BBR (NSFNET). electrical and optical traffic grooming. Also, we proposed two
spectrum reservation schemes, called SRNP and SRLP, to es-
tablish a new lightpath. Various traffic-grooming policies were
achieved by adjusting the edge weight of AG.
We compared different traffic-grooming polices in terms of
BBR, number of used transponder, number of virtual hops, and
number of physical hops. Simulation results showed that there
is a tradeoff among policies and they should be implemented
depending on the objectives of the network operator. Also, for
the spectrum reservation schemes, we found that SRNP outper-
formed SRLP and led to better performance for both spectrum
and transponder utilization.

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Jiawei Zhang received the Ph.D. degree from State Key Lab of Information Pho-
tonics and Optical Communication at Beijing University of Posts and Telecom-
munications (BUPT), Beijing, China, in 2014. He was also a Visiting Student at
the University of California, Davis, CA, USA, from September 2012 to January
2014 under the supervision of Prof. Biswanath Mukherjee.
He currently holds a Postdoctoral position with School of Electronic Engi-
neering, BUPT. His research interests including software-defined elastic optical
networks, optical transport networks, network function virtualization, and intel-
ligent radio optical access network.
Dr. Zhang served for Technical Program Committees for workshop on cloud
computing system, networks and applications at IEEE Globecom 2014 and
IEEE ICC 2015 conferences.
Yuefeng Ji is a Professor, National Distinguished Teacher, and the Dean at
the Institute of Information Photonics and Optical Communication at Beijing
University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China. He is the Chief
Scientist of China national 973 Program, and the member of China national
863 expert group. He has published more than 100 papers in journals and con-
ferences such as Optics Express, PTL, Communication Letter, Communication
Magazine, OFC, ECOC, and so on. He also hold some international patents. His
research interests are primarily in the areas of optical fiber communication and
broadband information networking.
Mei Song, biography is not available at the time of publication.
191
Yongli Zhao received the B.S. degree in communication engineering and the
Ph.D. degree in electromagnetic field and microwave technology from Beijing
University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT) , Beijing, China, respec-
tively, in 2005 and in 2010. He is currently with the Institute of Information
Photonics and Optical Communications at BUPT. More than 140 articles have
been published. His research focuses on software-defined optical networking,
elastic optical networks, packet transport networks, and so on.
Xiaosong Yu received the B.S. degree from the Department of Electronic and
Information Engineering at Beijing Information Science and Technology Uni-
versity, Beijing, China, in 2008 and the M.S. degree from the University of
Science and Technology, Beijing, in 2011. He is currently working toward the
Ph.D. degree in State Key Lab of Information Photonics and Optical Commu-
nication at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing. He is
also a Visiting Student at the University of California, Davis, CA, USA, under
the supervision of Prof. Biswanath Mukherjee. His research interests including
elastic optical networks, network virtualization, and management and control
of multilayer optical transport networks.
Jie Zhang is a Professor and the Vice Dean at the Institute of Information Pho-
tonics and Optical Communications at Beijing University of Posts and Telecom-
munications, Beijing, China. He is sponsored by above ten projects of Chinese
government. Eight books and more than 100 articles have been published. Seven
patents have also been granted. He serves as one of TPC members in ACP2009,
PS2009, ONDM2010, and so on. His research focuses on optical transport net-
works, packet transport networks, and so on.
Biswanath Mukherjee (S’82–M’87–F’07) received the B.Tech. (Hons.) de-
gree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India, in 1980, and
the Ph.D. degree from the University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA, in
1987. He is a Distinguished Professor at the University of California (UC),
Davis, CA, where he has been since 1987, and served as the Chairman at the
Department of Computer Science from 1997 to 2000. He served a five-year
term as a Founding Member of the Board of Directors of IPLocks, Inc., a Sil-
icon Valley startup company. He has served on the Technical Advisory Board
of a number of startup companies, most recently Teknovus, Intelligent Fiber
Optic Systems, and LookAhead Decisions Inc.. He is an Author of the text-
book Optical WDM Networks (New York: Springer, 2006) and an Editor of
Springer’s Optical Networks Book Series. Dr. Mukherjee co-received the Op-
tical Networking Symposium Best Paper Award at the IEEE Globecom 2007
and 2008 conferences. He co-received the 1991 National Computer Security
Conference Best Paper Award. He received the 2004 UC Davis Distinguished
Graduate Mentoring Award. He serves or has served on the editorial boards of
eight journals, most notably IEEE/ACM TRANSACTIONS ON NETWORKING and
IEEE NETWORK. He served as the Technical Program Chair of the IEEE
INFOCOM’ 96 conference. He served as the Technical Program Co-Chair
of the Optical Fiber Communications Conference 2009. He was the Steer-
ing Committee Chair of the IEEE Advanced Networks and Telecom Systems
(ANTS) Conference, and was the General Co-Chair of ANTS in 2007 and 2008,
respectively.