Optimization in spectrum-sliced optical networks

Abstract

Current communication in optical networks presents a wide range of granularities, making it hard to use the optical spectrum efficiently under the WDM framework. In Spectrum Sliced Optical Networks, the WDM rigid frequency grid is replaced by a more flexible structure, in which the spectrum is organized in frequency slots, and each traffic flow is assigned to an appropriate set of contiguous slots. The classical Routing and Wavelength Assignment (RWA) problem is then replaced by a Routing and Spectrum assignment (RSA) problem. This paper addresses an iterativa approach to balance the network load during the routing decision in Spectrum-Elastic Optical Path Networks. We have built numerical examples to illustrate the performance of our routing approach. Comparisons to other routing techniques show that our approach mitigates the lightpath requests blocking probability.