GMPLS Control Plane With Distributed Multipath RMSA for Elastic Optical Networks

Elastic optical networking (EON) has the constraint that all flows must have contiguous allocated frequency slots across all fiber links end-to-end, hence, the routing, modulation and spectrum assignment (RMSA) is one of the most important considerations in EON. This paper proposes and demonstrates a design of a generalized multiprotocol label switching (GMPLS) control plane for EON with distributed RMSA. The proposed approach uses an extended RSVP-TE to find multipath by broadcasting PATH message, using tentative reservation to avoid setting up multipath for one request. The proposed method also overcomes challenges faced by the previously pursued GMPLS-EON methods which relied on dynamic OSPF-TE where control plane overhead and the collision among lightpath requests caused by signaling latency. Simulation results based on the proposed GMPLS-EON method on different network scenarios reveal that our proposed design reduces the blocking probability by 4.56 and 3.86 when compared with the conventional GMPLS and GMPLS/PCE approaches, respectively, in the NSF topology at the network offered load of 60 Erlang. It also reduces signaling time by a factor of 1.84 compared with conventional GMPLS/PCE approach in the same network condition.