A Novel Protection Strategy for Elastic Optical Networks Based on Space Division Multiplexing

The emergence of elastic optical networks (EONs) has been viewed as a solution to the diverse bandwidth requests that will occur in the next generation's network applications and Internet which are anticipated to handle a traffic growth at a rate greater than Petabit per second level. However, the crunch in fiber capacity will persist owing to use of only two dimensions of multiplexing in the EONs. With the adoption of space division multiplexing (SDM), an extra freedom degree can be used such that the EONs will be able support the required capacity of the future diverse traffic. Further, with an increase in the rate(s) of transmission(s), to counter the network failures, there will occur the need for protection mechanisms, specifically those, which can protect routes and provision solutions which are end-to-end. In the current work, as an intial step for protecting an EON based on SDM, we design a strategy which (i) is independent of the failure(s), and (ii) protects the route(s). We evaluate our proposed strategy considering realistic assumptions, topologies and parameters, and for different traffic load values. The obtained simulation results reveal that (i) our proposed strategy is efficient in provisioning of protection which is pre-configured, and (ii) the considered network topology's node degree significantly affects both, the blocking and the evaluated route's length in the protected EON based on SDM.