Fragmentation Metrics in Spectrally-Spatially Flexible Optical Networks

Spectrally-spatially flexible optical networks (SS-FONs) are proposed as a solution for future traffic requirements in optical backbone networks. As SS-FONs operate within flex-grid, the provisioning of lightpaths spanning multiple frequency slots results in spectrum fragmentation, especially in presence of dynamic traffic. Fragmentation, in turn, may lead to blocking of dynamic requests due to the lack of sufficiently-large free spectral windows. In this paper, to reach a better understanding of fragmentation in SS-FON, we extend several metrics used in (single-core) elastic optical networks to measure the fragmentation in SS-FONs. Next, we apply these metrics to a dynamic-routing algorithm with the goal of minimizing bandwidth blocking. Finally, we analyze the impact of spatial continuity constraint (SCC) on the network fragmentation. Simulations run on two representative network topologies show that the root mean square factor metric yields the best performance in terms of blocking when compared to other analyzed metrics.