Light-segment: Crosstalk-and Modulation-Aware Spectrum Allocation with Segmentation in SDM-EON

Due to the modern bandwidth-intensive, ever heterogeneous, and evolving network traffic, exhaustion of network resources under current technologies is foreseeable. In order to provision high quality network services for the next-generation network users, emerging network technologies must be relied on. Elastic optical networks (EON) and space division multiplexing (SDM) are the two preferred emerging optical network architectures to solve the future challenge of network demands. However, the spectrum contiguity constraint introduced by EON may lead to significant fragmentation. Slice-ability is an effective allocation framework that can mitigate spectrum fragmentation by dividing the lightpath into a set of sub-lightpaths, where each sub-lightpath consists of a fraction of the original lightpath bandwidth for the entire duration of the original request. Sliceability is conventionally used to solve routing, modulation, and spectrum assignment (RMSA) problems in EON. In this paper, we propose SDM sliceable framework that is crosstalk-and modulation-aware for solving the routing, modulation, core, and spectrum assignment (RMCSA) problems in SDM-EON. We refer each sub-lightpath as tight-segment. SDM slice-ability framework is compatible with all core and spectrum assignment (CSA) algorithms in literature. We evaluate light-segment based RMCSA algorithms using three existing CSA algorithms: First-Fit, Largest-First, and Best-Fit. Based on extensive performance evaluations, we observe significant improvement of RMCSA algorithms with SDM slice-ability compared to conventional approaches without SDM slice-ability.