Experimenting with bandwidth-variable routing on a large-scale ASON test-bed

Bandwidth-variable (BV) optical networks have obvious advantages to provide spectrum-efficient transportation. Previous research showed that the BV-supported adaptive routing (AR-BV) had lower blocking probability than the BV-supported fixed routing (FR-BV), when signaling blocking is not considered. In order to study the overall blocking probability, we propose a BV extension to RSVP-TE signaling protocol, and implement it on our large-scale ASON test-bed. Results show that due to the flooding process, AR-BV has a higher signaling blocking probability compared with the FR-BV, especially in a highly dynamic network scenario, and this weakens its advantage in overall blocking performance.