Shared path protection for distance adaptive elastic Optical Networks under dynamic traffic

Elastic Optical Networks (EONs), evolved as a scalable infrastructure to provide optical connectivity for large variety of bandwidth requests ranging from 1Gbps to 1Tbps. Thanks to the enabling technologies such as bandwidth variable transponders and flexible switches, bandwidth adaptive spectrum allocation became possible. EONs can carry large optical channels with higher spectrum efficiency with the recent changes in the standard fixed division of optical spectrum. In this study we propose a distance adaptive, dynamic shared path protection scheme for EONs. In conventional WDM networks, shareability used to be one of the prime objectives to maximize the backup resource efficiency. In EONs, spectrum resources can be shared partially between connections and different parts of the allocated spectrum may be shared by different connections at the same time. Not only the routing but also spectrum allocation of backup resources has a big impact on the shareability in EONs. Taking this into account, we developed a novel RSA (Routing and Spectrum Allocation) algorithm applying different strategies for primary and backup resources called Primary First-Fit Modified Backup Last-Fit (PF-MBL) aiming to reduce the fragmentation and to increase the shareability. As a result overall bandwidth blocking probability is significantly reduced in the network. Results show that PF-MBL can improve the performance in terms of bandwidth blocking probability by 24% up to 59% compared to the current outperforming algorithm when the bandwidth acceptance ratio of the system varies from 90% to 99.9% in different loads.