Dynamic Multi-Path Service Provisioning under Differential Delay Constraint in Elastic Optical Networks

Optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (O-OFDM) technology has the elastic feature of allocating spectrum resources based on subcarrier slots with bandwidths at a few GHz or even narrower. This feature enables us to utilize link capacity more efficiently by splitting a connection's traffic over multiple routing paths. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic multi-path provisioning algorithm for O-OFDM based elastic optical networks. The algorithm tries to set up dynamic connections with single-path routing in a best-effort manner. When a connection cannot be served with a single routing path, the algorithm uses an auxiliary-graph based approach to calculate a multi-path provisioning scheme based on two parameters, i.e., the differential delay upper-bound and the bandwidth allocation granularity. Simulation results indicate that compared with several existing single-path provisioning algorithms, the proposed algorithm provides lower bandwidth blocking probability and achieves 10-18% improvement on average network throughput.