Deterministic Lightpath Scheduling and Routing in Elastic Optical Networks

A huge torrent of data traffic is generated from various heterogeneous applications and services at the Internet backbone. In general, at the backbone, all such applications and services are allocated spectral resources under a shared spectrum environment within elastic optical networks (EONs). In such a fully shared environment, connection requests (CRs) belonging to different traffic profiles compete for spectral resources. Hence, it is very challenging for network operators to resolve resource conflict that occur at the time of provisioning resources to such CRs. The heterogeneous traffic profile (HTP) considered in this work includes permanent lightpath demands (PLDs) and scheduled lightpath demands (SLDs). We propose various distance adaptive routing and spectrum assignment (DA-RSA) heuristics to resolve resource conflict among these two traffic profiles in EONs under a full sharing environment. Conventionally, preemption was the only technique to resolve such resource conflict among HTPs. Since preemption involves the overhead of selecting CRs to be preempted and then deallocating the resources given to those CRs, excessive preemption adversely affects the performance of the network. Therefore, in this work, we utilized bandwidth splitting as a solution to resolve resource conflict among HTPs under such a shared environment in EONs. Moreover, an integrated solution consisting of splitting and preemption is also proposed. We refer to this new integration as flow-based preemption. Our simulation results demonstrate that bandwidth splitting-based heuristics yield significant improvement in terms of the amount of bandwidth accepted in the network, link and node utilization ratio, number of transponders utilized and the amount of bandwidth dropped due to preemption. Moreover, the flow-based preemption approach is proved to be superior in performance amongst all proposed strategies.