Techno-economic comparison of dynamic traffic grooming strategies for elastic optical networks

We extend past work presented at ICTON 2015, where we reviewed and extended a number of dynamic traffic grooming algorithms proposed by Zhang et al. for elastic optical networks. In that paper we showed that, on the one hand, different grooming policies lead to different connection blocking ratios and have different associated economic costs. On the other hand, different types of transceivers (supporting a single type of modulation format, or being able to generate different ones) also lead to different results in terms of those parameters: blocking ratio and cost. So, a question arises: what is the best option when designing an elastic optical network? Is it better to use a cost-effective grooming policy with transceivers supporting several modulations, or to use cheaper fixed-modulation transceivers combined with an effective policy in terms of blocking ratio? In this paper, we analyze which combination of transceiver type and grooming policy has advantages from a techno-economic perspective (considering both CAPEX and OPEX), while providing a target performance in terms of blocking ratio.