Abstract
Traffic in current networks is constantly increasing due to the growing popularity of various network services. The currently deployed backbone optical networks apply wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) techniques in single-core single-mode fibers (SMFs) to transmit the light. However, the capacity of SMFs is limited due to physical constraints, and new technologies are required in the near future. Spectrally–spatially-flexible optical networks (SS-FONs) are proposed to provide a substantial capacity increase by exploring the spatial dimension. However, before this technology will reach maturity, various aspects need to be addressed. In particular, during traffic grooming, multiple small requests are aggregated into large-capacity optical corridors in an optical layer to increase the spectral efficiency. As the summary traffic volume is dynamically changing, it may be required to set up and tear down optical channels, which results in network fragmentation. As a consequence, in a congested network, part of the requests can be blocked due to the lack of spectrum resources. Thus, the grooming of traffic and the creation of lightpaths should be carefully designed to minimize network fragmentation. In this study, we present several fragmentation metrics and develop a fragmentation-aware traffic grooming algorithm that reduces the bandwidth blocking probability.
Highlights
The continuous growth of traffic in the backbone networks has been observed, aiming to mitigate the constantly increasing requirements of various network services
The results showed a tradeoff among different traffic grooming policies as they accounted for different objectives, such as maximizing the spectrum efficiency, minimizing the blocking ratio, or minimizing the number of transponders used
We proposed the Fragmentation-Aware Traffic Grooming (FragA-TG) algorithm in the context of spatially-flexible optical networks (SS-FONs) with lane change ability for different numbers of data centers
Summary
The continuous growth of traffic in the backbone networks has been observed, aiming to mitigate the constantly increasing requirements of various network services. A combination of SDM and EONs allows creating SChs in the spectrum and/or spatial domain depending on the fiber and network nodes’ architecture, allowing for high allocation flexibility. Note that the topic of network fragmentation has been extensively studied in the context of EONs (see [13,14,15]); it is relatively new for SS-FONs. Introducing the additional spatial dimension causes the metrics and algorithms designed for EONs to be unable to directly be applied in the optimization of SS-FONs, especially when lane changes are considered. To the best of our knowledge, fragmentation-aware traffic grooming has not been considered for dynamic traffic in the context of SS-FONs with lane change ability To fill this gap, we proposed a grooming algorithm to minimize the bandwidth blocking probability by minimizing the introduced SS-FONs’ fragmentation metrics.
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