Spare capacity provisioning for quasi-static traffic

Resource provisioning has for long been an important area of research in network design. The traffic grooming problem in optical networks is a design problem of aggregating sub-wavelength traffic demands onto lightpaths and lightpaths onto fiber links such that the required electronic switching capability, hence network cost, can be minimized. Because of the reconfiguration cost in optical grooming networks, a reactive resource provisioning approach may become inefficient, and result in revenue loss. In this paper, we propose an over-provisioning scheme, which pre-allocates the spare capacity of lightpaths to dynamic sub-wavelength traffic demands such that the network can be more agile in responding to traffic increment requests. For the single-link case, we formulate the problem as a non-linear programming problem, and for under reasonable assumptions, we prove the objective function is convex. We provide an exact algorithm to find the optimal solution. The problem with general topologies is then studied. We prove the NP-hardness in this case, and propose heuristics. Numerical results show our heuristics perform well.