A novel BV-WSS based flow aggregation (BV-WSS-FA) scheme for finer-grained services in elastic optical networks

The flow aggregation scheme which aggregates a large number of finer-grained services into one large flow can save transceivers and improve spectrum efficiency. It ensures that all services in the aggregated flow have a same routing. Moreover, the spectrum allocated to all finer-grained services in the aggregated flow is continuous. Compared with independent transmission scheme which conducts the distance-adaptive routing and spectrum allocation for each finer-grained service, the flow aggregation scheme consumes more spectrum resource and has a high blocking rate. To address this problem, we proposed a novel BV-WSS based flow aggregation (BV-WSS-FA) scheme which only ensures that the spectrum allocated to all finer-grained services in the aggregated flow is continuous. A heuristic algorithm is designed for BV-WSS-FA. Numerical results show that BV-WSS-FA can greatly reduce network cost without consuming more spectrum resources.