On-demand routing and spectrum allocation for energy-efficient AoD nodes in SDM-EONs

Elastic optical networks (EONs) and spacedivision multiplexing (SDM) are promising technologies for future core optical networks with high transmission capacity. Traditional optical node architectures for SDM-EONs have two important problems: flexibility and power consumption. Architecture on demand (AoD) is a new concept for an optical node architecture, and an optical node based on this concept is called an AoD node. AoD nodes can be dynamically constructed according to the traffic request by interconnecting input/output ports and building modules with optical switches. Although AoD nodes have great flexibility, power consumption is still a serious problem for them. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient network system that includes a novel energy-efficient AoD node architecture and resource assignment method cooperating with this node architecture. The proposed system solves the power-consumption problem by simplifying the implemented building modules based on spatial multiplicity of SDM-EONs. The proposed on-demand routing and spectrum allocation method efficiently satisfies the restricted spectrum arrangement that is required by energy-efficient AoD nodes. Finally, we evaluate the proposed system of node architecture and resource allocation method through computer simulations. The simulations show that the proposed network system can improve both the power consumption and the blocking probability of path setup requests in the entire network.