Spectral and spatial 2D fragmentation-aware routing and spectrum assignment algorithms in elastic optical networks [invited]

This paper investigates the spectrum fragmentation issue, which undermines the bandwidth efficiency in elastic optical networks. After categorizing the two-dimensional fragmentation problem as the fragmentation and misalignment subproblems, this paper proposes joint routing and spectrum assignment (RSA) algorithms to alleviate the spectral fragmentation in the lightpath provisioning process. The time complexity of the two proposed algorithms are analyzed in detail, and both algorithms can run in 0(kdnC log C) time, where k is the number of the shortest path in the routing algorithm, d is the maximum node degree in the network, n is the number of nodes in the network, and C is the link capacity expressed as the number of spectral slots. Simulation results indicate that the proposed fragmentation-aware (FA) RSA algorithm and the FA algorithm with congestion avoidance (CA) outperform the existing schemes in terms of blocking probability (BP) reduction. Compared with the benchmark K-shortest-path routing and first-fit assignment (KSP-FF) algorithm, the proposed FA and FA-CA algorithms can achieve a BP reduction of [100%, 4.43%] and [100%, 6.45%], respectively, according to the traffic load in a sample NSFNET topology.