Shared Protection Survivable Multipath-Based VONE in EONs Integrated with QKD

The combination of network virtualization (NV) technology and elastic optical networks (EONs) can further improve the flexibility of network resource allocation while bringing new security risks. For EONs are vulnerable to eavesdropping attacks by third parties, the security of data transmission in virtual optical network (VON) cannot be guaranteed. Quantum key distribution (QKD) provides verified unconditional security based on quantum entanglement properties. EONs integrated with QKD, as the physical network for virtual optical network embedding (VONE), can improve the security of VON. In addition, the survivability of VONE is a critical requirement. So, a shared protection survivable multipath-based VONE in EONs integrated with QKD (SPSMP-VONE) algorithm is discussed for solving the VONE problem under the single-link failure scenario. Specifically, the process of virtual link embedding is divided into the phase of ciphertext data transmission path embedding and the phase of key distribution path embedding. The phase of ciphertext data transmission path embedding adopts multipath shared protection strategy with spectrum partitioning. And the phase of key distribution path embedding design a path splitting strategy when the key resources as well as spectrum resources are insufficient on a single path. Simulation results demonstrate that the SPSMP-VONE algorithm can effectively improve the spectrum utilization ratio and key utilization ratio by up to 12%.