Dynamic time and spectrum fragmentation-aware service provisioning in elastic optical networks with multi-path routing

In this paper, we propose a multi-path fragmentation-aware routing, modulation and spectrum assignment algorithm (RMSA) for advance reservation (AR) and immediate reservation (IR) requests in elastic optical networks. Immediate reservation requests should be provided with service immediately, while advance reservation requests have specific starting times and holding times. As lightpaths are set up and torn down, fragmentation may occur in both spectrum and time domains. To decrease the two-dimensional fragmentation and to solve the problem of resource scarcity, we propose splitting requests into different parts and transferring these parts along one or more paths utilizing sliceable bandwidth variable transponders. We first introduce a model to solve the problem and propose a two-dimensional fragmentation occurrence measurement in spectrum and time domains. Then we propose a multi-path fragmentation-aware RMSA algorithm (MPFA). Simulation results show that MPFA can achieve better performance than existing algorithms in terms of blocking probability and spectrum utilization.