Energy-efficient dynamic provisioning for spectrum elastic optical networks

Spectrum elastic optical networks support flexible central frequency and spectrum assignment for lightpaths. In this paper, we investigate energy-efficient dynamic provisioning for such networks. When provisioning a connection, the routing problems in both electrical layer (routing over multiple lightpaths) and optical layer (routing over multiple fibers) have to be addressed. Also, the control plane has to determine the optical-layer spectrum assignment considering the spectrum-continuity constraint as well as the bandwidth variability of transponders. We adopt a novel auxiliary graph based on which a new dynamic provisioning policy called Time-Aware Provisioning with Bandwidth Reservation (TAP-BR) is proposed. TAP-BR incorporates two important factors to facilitate energy-efficient provisioning: time awareness and bandwidth reservation. We compare TAP-BR with previously-proposed dynamic provisioning policies and show that TAP-BR can save significant amount of energy and make efficient use of spectrum resources.