Multi-Path Fragmentation-Aware Advance Reservation Provisioning in Elastic Optical Networks

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. To decrease fragmentation, we propose splitting requests into different parts and transferring each of these parts along a single-path or multi-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.