Routing, spectrum and core allocation in flexgrid SDM networks with multi-core fibers

Space division multiplexing (SDM) over multi-core fiber (MCF) is advocated as a promising technology to overcome the capacity limit of the current single-core optical networks. However, employing the MCF for flexgrid networks necessitates the development of new concepts, such as routing, spectrum and core allocation (RSCA) for traffic demands. The introduction of MCF in the networks mitigates the spectrum continuity constraint of the routing and spectrum assignment (RSA) problem. In fact cores can be switched freely on different links during routing of the network traffic. Similarly, the route disjointness for demands with same allocated spectrum diminishes to core disjointness at the link level. On the other hand, some new issues such as the inter-core crosstalk should be taken into account while solving the RSCA problem. This paper formulates the RSCA network planning problem using the integer linear programming (ILP) formulation. The aim is to optimally minimize the maximum number of spectrum slices required on any core of MCF of a flexgrid SDM network. Furthermore, a scalable and effective heuristic is proposed for the same problem and its performance is compared with the optimal solution. The results show that the proposed algorithm is able to well approximate the optimal solution based on ILP model.