Providing Quality of Service (QoS) for Data Traffic in Elastic Optical Networks (EONs)

With the growth of users’ traffic demands, the need for a network to flexibly assign the existing resources to the demands becomes an important challenging issue. Therefore, a specific generation of optical networks called elastic optical network (EON) has been introduced recently. EON can assign the available resources proportional to the requested amount of arriving demands. However, one of the important issues in EON which has not been addressed is the provision of quality of service (QoS) for data traffic. Blocking probability (BP), loss rate, delay and jitter are known to be well-known QoS parameters. Based on QoS-aware classification, the data traffic is divided into high-quality (HQ) and low-quality (LQ) traffic. Accordingly, the QoS for the HQ traffic is preferred to be guaranteed. Among mentioned QoS parameters, BP is the most critical metric which has to be carefully taken into consideration. In this paper, we propose two novel algorithms in order to provide QoS for data traffic and alleviate the BP for HQ traffic as QoS provision based on squeezing (QPS) and QoS provision based on fragmentation (QPF). The proposed algorithms, respectively, use reservation and preemption mechanisms to provide better QoS. The numerical results confirm that the QPF and QPS algorithms are capable of alleviating the blocking probability of HQ traffic at the expense of slight increase in blocking probability for LQ traffic.