While inter-domain routing in the Internet is a widely researched topic, issues concerning inter-domain at
the layers below network layer are relatively new. The efficient establishment of connections with high bandwidth between
multiples domains separated by technology, administrative rules and different control signals is an open challenge.
In the field of optical networks, a question that has been widely debated, but little has been seen in
multi-domain environments, is the traffic grooming in WDM networks. Solutions for traffic grooming in multi-domain scenarios
require greater complexity than the intra-domain solutions, given the need to consider several aspects such as signaling overhead,
knowledge and communication between the Path Computation Elements, connection set up waiting time, policies, and others.
Moreover, many new applications that demands high bandwidth during a known period of time are emerging.
We can consider the example of on-line broadcasting of any major sporting event, where the user buy a service that require a lot
of bandwidth during the transmission of the event. It is expected that such applications continue to grow, including new services
where the bandwidth is set by the user when buying the service. New architectures are being developed to allow the definition of
on-line terms of Service Level Agreement to be fulfilled by the service provider.
Lastly, although rings and point-to-point links will continue to be used for specific technologies and in
legacy networks, we can expect more and more networks to be built as meshes. A service provider whose network is based on a
mesh is able to provide value-added features such as on-demand provisioning and rapid protection without the massive
over-deployment of network resources that would be needed in simpler topologies.
Considering all these aspects, the proposed project aims to study inter-domain dynamic traffic grooming in mesh
WDM networks in the cases when the traffic duration is known.