Triumph of the Bandwidth Commons: Elastic Reservations, Price Incentives, and Request Realignement in LambdaGrids

Reservation of lightpaths in dynamically switched optical networks facilitates guaranteed bandwidth. However, reservation of bandwidth can often lead to bandwidth fragmentation which significantly reduces system utilization and increases the blocking probability of requests. An interesting approach to mitigating this problem is to induce quasi-flexibility in the user requests. A smart scheduling strategy can then exploit this quasi- flexibility and optimize bandwidth utilization. However, there has to be an incentive for flexibility from the user's perspective as well. In this paper, we explore how the network service provider (NSP) can influence user flexibility by dynamically engineering pricing incentives and by suggesting request realignment to overcome reservation contention. Ultimately, user flexibility will lead to efficient network utilization, reduce the price for the users, and increase the revenue for the NSP.