On the Performance of Grooming Strategies for Offloading IP Flows onto Lightpaths in Hybrid Networks

Hybrid networks take data forwarding decisions at multiple network levels. In order to make an efficient use of hybrid networks, traffic engineering solutions (e.g., routing and data grooming techniques) are commonly employed. Within the specific context of a self-managed hybrid optical and packet switching network, one important aspect to be considered is how to efficiently and autonomically move IP flows from the IP level over lightpaths at the optical level. The more IP traffic is moved (offloaded), leaving the least amount of traffic on the IP level, the better. Based on that, we investigate in this paper different strategies to move IP flows onto lightpaths while observing the percentage of offloaded IP traffic per strategy.