A tabu search algorithm for routing and spectrum allocation in elastic optical networks

In this paper we present a tabu search-based algorithm, which is dedicated to solving the routing and spectrum allocation problem in elastic optical networks. To evaluate performance of the proposed method, we carry a number of experiments on realistic network topologies. We compare our method with both optimal results yielded by the CPLEX solver and results obtained by heuristic algorithms that were proposed in the literature for the same optimization problem. The findings of our investigation show that the proposed tabu search method provides the solutions close to optimal ones and it significantly outperforms the reference methods.