Resource Allocation and Multicast Routing in Elastic Optical Networks

In this paper, we formulate an integer linear programming (ILP) to perform multicast routing and spectrum assignment (MRSA) in elastic optical networks, which serves jointly a set of multicast requests. In this formulation, all physical layer restrictions including modulation level assignment, maximum number of multicast capable nodes (MCNs), and maximum splitting degree (MSD) of MCNs, are considered. In addition, we modify the proposed joint ILP to serve multicast requests one-by-one, which is referred to as a separate ILP. Furthermore, we present three heuristic algorithms for MRSA, namely distance-based MRSA (DMRSA), congestion-based MRSA (CMRSA), and mixed CMRSA/DMRSA, which are applicable in both static and dynamic operation scenarios. In CMRSA and DMRSA, the link length and the amount of occupied spectrum are considered as the cost function of multicast routing, respectively; and in mixed CMRSA/DMRSA, a combination of normalized link length and normalized occupied spectrum is considered as the cost function. The comparison of ILPs and heuristic algorithms in static operation reveals that the joint ILP, as the benchmark, gives the optimum solution while has the most computational complexity. Furthermore, the separate ILP has lower complexity at the cost of consuming slightly more spectrum. Unless the DMRSA method, which has the worst performance, the gap between the other two heuristic algorithms and the ILPs is negligible. Furthermore, simulation results of dynamic operation scenarios reveal that mixed CMRSA/DMRSA outperforms other two heuristics algorithms in terms of blocking probability.