A parallel multiobjective approach based on honey bees for traffic grooming in optical networks

In this paper, we propose a parallel multiobjective approach based on the honey bees' behaviour for grooming low-speed traffic requests onto high-capacity optical channels. This problem of grooming low-speed traffic requests is known in the literature as the traffic grooming problem. This problem in mesh optical networks is an NP-hard problem, in which the solution time raises exponentially when the network size increases; therefore, the use of metaheuristics and parallelism jointly is a great option in order to reduce the prohibitive runtime. The parallel approach is implemented for shared-memory architectures by using OpenMP. In our experiments, we have measured the speedup and efficiency of the method with 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16 cores when dealing with three optical networks: small (6-node network, 6 nodes), medium (National Science Foundation, 14 nodes) and large (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, 55 nodes). Furthermore, we present a comparative study with traditional methods and other multiobjective metaheuristics published in the literature; in which we show the advantages of our multiobjective proposal.