Tabu search algorithm for routing, modulation and spectrum allocation in elastic optical network with anycast and unicast traffic

The paper presents a novel method based on the standard tabu search (TS) approach, dedicated to solve the routing, modulation and spectrum allocation (RMSA) problem in elastic optical networks (EONs). The considered formulation of the RMSA problem covers simultaneously unicast (one-to-one) and anycast (one-to-one-of-many) traffic demands. This is a very important issue taking into account the fact that anycasting gains more and more importance in contemporary Internet due the growing popularity of services like cloud computing, content delivery networks, and video streaming. In this paper, we formulate RMSA as an integer linear programming (ILP) problem and we study four different objective functions, which are related to, respectively, cost, power consumption, maximum and average spectrum usage. We evaluate the performance of our TS method based on the comparison with both optimal results yielded by the CPLEX solver and the results obtained by reference heuristic algorithms proposed in the literature. Moreover, we evaluate benefits of the use of anycasting in EONs. The performed simulation experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms other reference methods. What is more, we show that the anycast transmission can provide significant savings compared to the typical unicast transmission.