Optical Inverse Multiplexing Technique Applied to Elastic Optical Networks

The successive establishment and disconnection of call requests, under dynamic and heterogeneous-bandwidth traffic, may cause fragmentation problem in elastic optical networks, which can substantially reduce the network effective spectral usage. One form to mitigate this problem is the use of the optical inverse multiplexing based on superchannel multicasting, which allows the network's call admission controller to relax the continuity and contiguity constraints by possibly dividing the required spectrum in two or more non contiguous spectral strips. This article proposes an evolutionary multiobjective algorithm to optimize the placement of superchannel multicasting modules in the network nodes, aiming to reduce frequency spectrum fragmentation. We evaluate the proposal in terms of reduction of call request blocking probability and compare with other metrics.