Minimum-Cost Traffic Grooming in Metro Optical Networks with Co-Existing Muxponders and OTN Grooming Boards

Optical metro networks must support heterogeneous-rate traffic requests generated by new 5G and beyond services, and network operators are constantly seeking to accommodate such heterogeneous traffic with minimum possible cost. Traffic grooming in Optical Transport Network (OTN) is a key technology to achieve cost savings in metro, as it can minimize the number of costly optical transmission interfaces, at the cost of deploying additional grooming boards. While OTN grooming has been traditionally accomplished using one, or a hierarchy of, OTN grooming boards, lately also muxponders are being deployed in metro networks and can be used for traffic grooming. Muxponders allow to reach higher rates and do not need separate grooming matrices as traditional boards, hence enforcing new types of constraints in the grooming problem. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel solution, based on a Genetic Algorithm, for minimum-cost traffic grooming with co-existing muxponders and OTN grooming boards. Illustrative numerical results on realistic problem instances show that, compared to the benchmark single-technology approach, our proposed approaches can reach up to 35% cost savings.