Physical-Layer Security in MCF-Based SDM-EONs: Would Crosstalk-Aware Service Provisioning be Good Enough?

In this paper, we consider a multicore fiber (MCF)-enabled elastic optical network, in which certain nodes have a lower trust level than the others, and study how to provision lightpaths with considerations of the impairments and security vulnerabilities caused by intercore crosstalk. We propose attack-aware routing, spectrum, and core assignment algorithms that give priority to avoiding physical-layer security threats and then try to reduce the crosstalk-induced impairments. Specifically, both static network planning and dynamic network provisioning are investigated. For static planning, we first formulate an integer linear programming (ILP) model to optimize the spectrum utilization and intercore crosstalk level jointly and then propose a time-efficient heuristic. Simulation results confirm that the proposed heuristic can approximate the ILP's performance with much higher time efficiency in a small-scale network and outperform an existing benchmark in large networks. For dynamic provisioning, we design a heuristic to balance the tradeoff between blocking probability and crosstalk and conduct extensive simulations to verify its effectiveness.