Provisioning and restoration with sliceability in GMPLS-based elastic optical networks [Invited]

Multiflow bandwidth variable transponders supporting sliceability enable effective use of node and spectrum resources in elastic optical networks (EONs). Specifically, such transponders are capable of creating multiple optical flow units (i.e., subcarriers) that can be aggregated or independently routed according to the traffic requirements. This paper investigates the utilization of sliceability during provisioning and restoration in EONs. Specifically, a scheme is proposed to exploit the possibility of establishing/recovering an optical connection as a single superchannel or as a number of independent subcarriers. To this end the spectrum overbuild introduced by the sliceability application has to be taken into account. Both centralized and distributed implementations of the proposed schemes are evaluated in a generalized multiprotocol label switching (GMPLS)-based EON. Simulations show that despite the introduced spectrum overbuild, the utilization of sliceability permits us to significantly increase the amount of established/recovered traffic. Moreover, simulations show that the blocking probability reduction is achieved with only a slight increase in the setup time.