Cross-Layer Spectrum Defragmentation for IP over Elastic Optical Network

Spectrum defragmentation is important for an elastic optical network (EON) to enhance its spectrum utilization. However, the cause of spectrum fragmentation is the dynamicity of client-layer services. Thus, it is of significance to also consider the reconfiguration of the client-layer services when carrying out spectrum defragmentation. We expect that this effort can further improve the network spectrum utilization. Motivated by this, we propose cross-layer spectrum defragmentation for an IP and EON network so as to achieve better spectrum utilization by this joint effort. Simulation results show that the proposed cross-layer scheme is beneficial to greatly improve bandwidth blocking performance (BBP) compared to the other schemes that do not consider such joint effort.