Abstract
A light trail is a unidirectional bus from a convener node to an end node. The main advantage of a light trail over a light path is that the communication channel of a light trail can be accessed by intermediate nodes providing more flexibility for traffic grooming. Several auxiliary graph models have been developed in the literature for traffic grooming in light-trail optical WDM mesh networks. These auxiliary graph models have one or more drawbacks that do not fully reflect the characteristics of a light trail. This paper develops a novel auxiliary graph model that has none of the drawbacks and is able to reflect all characteristics of a light trail. Based on the auxiliary graph model, an effective dynamic traffic grooming algorithm is proposed. The performance of the proposed dynamic traffic grooming algorithm is studied via simulations.