Simulated Annealing algorithm for optimization of elastic optical networks with unicast and anycast traffic

The growing number of services like Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and cloud computing triggers a sustainable growth of data transfer and consequently leads to an increasing interest in anycasting that is an efficient way to provision network requests related to Data Centers. On the other hand, Elastic Optical Network (EON) is an effective and cost-efficient solution for optical networks, which can support bandwidth-demanding needs ranging beyond 100 Gb/s. This paper focuses on joint optimization of unicast and anycast traffic in EONs including both Routing and Spectrum Allocation (RSA). We propose a novel heuristic algorithm to solve the RSA problem. The algorithm - named VSA - is a hybrid method that combines a Simulated Annealing (SA) approach and a simple greedy algorithm. To evaluate our approach, we run a wide range of experiments on real network topologies. First, we tune VSA to find the best values of the algorithm's parameters. Next, we compare the performance of VSA against CPLEX (optimal results) and other heuristics. According to our experiments, VSA can improve the solution provided by a greedy algorithm by more than 10% and on average is about 4% worse in comparison to the optimal results.