Progress in network technologies and protocols is paving the road towards flexible optical transport networks, in which dynamic leasable circuits could be set up and released on a short-term basis according to customers requirements. Recently, new solutions for automatized network management promise to allow customers to on-line specify the terms of the Service Level Agreement (SLA) to be guaranteed by the service provider. Since this new information is made available, we propose to exploit the knowledge of connection holding time, among the other Service Level Specifications (SLS), to improve the routing efficiency. In this work we consider that a typical electronic-layer (e.g. SDH or MPLS) demand requires only a fraction of the capacity of the single wavelength bandwidth and we investigate a new algorithm for traffic grooming of sub-wavelength connections in an optical mesh network. We rely on the knowledge of the holding time of connection requests to efficiently exploit lightpath capacity and hence to achieve significant reduction in blocking probability for the traffic grooming problem. For a typical US nationwide network, we compare holding-time aware to holding-time-unaware, but otherwise efficient, approaches, obtaining remarkable reduction of blocking probability for practical scenarios.
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