SimEON: an open-source elastic optical network simulator for academic and industrial purposes

Abstract

In comparison with wavelength division multiplexing optical networks, elastic optical networks are much more flexible, presenting an efficient alternative to use the frequency spectrum to establish call requests in a scenario with different transmission bit rates and modulation schemes. Due to the variety of optical devices, node architectures and physical topologies, it is difficult to implement optical network prototypes to analyze operational scenarios in terms of blocking probability of call requests, the impact of capital and operational expenditures and energy consumption, for example. To our knowledge, there is no available open-source simulation tool exclusively for elastic optical networks in the literature. There are a few simulation tools that were used to obtain results for optical networks but most of their source codes are unavailable. The state of the art of these simulators and our developed simulation tool called Simulator for Elastic Optical Networks (SimEON) are presented. SimEON is an open-source software. It is developed under the GNU Lesser General Public License and takes into account principles of software engineering. In this article, we present the characteristics of our simulator, its architecture and considered parameters, along with some examples of the simulations that can be executed on it.