An Experimental Comparison of Routing and Spectrum Assignment Algorithms in Elastic Optical Networks

Abstract

Routing and Spectrum Assignment (RSA) is the fundamental problem in Elastic Optical Networks (EONs), which is an \(\mathcal{N}\mathcal{P}\)-complete problem. In this paper, we compare the performances of two typical RSA algorithms namely Spectrum-First and Route-First, and put forward a connection between the performances and the request distributions. The numerical results demonstrated that even though the Spectrum-First RSA algorithm outperforms significantly the Route-First RSA algorithm under concentrated distribution, the latter performs pretty better under uniform distribution, which is however somewhat different from that demonstrated in the literature.