Balancing Security and blocking performance with reconfiguration of the elastic optical spectrum

Reconfiguration of connections along frequency axis, - similar to frequency hopping in wireless systems, has been shown to improving security in elastic optical networks (EONs). However, the effect of spectrum reallocation on the connections' blocking and the associated connections' security is still under-explored. In this paper, we examine the effect of reconfiguration of connections on its security and blocking performance of an elastic optical link (EOL). We propose a Reconfiguration-as-a-Service (RaaS) method, which randomly reconfigures connections to improve its security, and for that scenario we model the connection patterns of an elastic optical link. We apply a multi-class continuous-time Markov chain under the first-fit and random-fit spectrum allocation (SA) method. Analytical results show that the random reconfiguration scheme can improve security at the cost of only a slight increase in blocking, depending on the rate at which it is performed, the link load and the capacity of an EOL. We hence show that it is indeed possible to balance the security and blocking performance with RaaS.