Telecommunications Network Grooming

Grooming has emerged as an active area of research within the operations research and telecommunications fields and concerns the optimization of network transmissions that span multiple distinct transmission channels, protocols, or technologies. This chapter explores the meaning of grooming, the technical context in which it can be applied, and example situations. A new taxonomy captures key aspects of grooming problems and is used to summarize over 50 key publications on this important traffic-engineering and optimization problem class.