Traffic Aggregation in IP-Based WDM vs. IP-Based Elastic Optical Networks

In the last two decades, the Internet Protocol (IP) traffic has been increasing rapidly. To overcome this challenge of IP traffic growth, the IP-based Wave Division Multiplexing (WDM) hybrid network architecture was proposed. This architecture makes the interaction between both layers IP and wavelength routed optical rigid WDM possible. However, the deployment of this architecture is not only expensive, but also highly power-consuming, while performing the required traffic aggregation functionality. Elastic Optical Networks (EON) technology has emerged, which is highly flexible and utilises spectral resources effectively by allocating a flexible number of spectrum slices to match better with the demanded connection bitrate. Therefore, EON is now considered a potential candidate for future optical transport networks. In this paper, we report on a performance comparison of IP/EON networks performance vs. IP/WDM networks. Our evaluation shows clearly that, although both multilayer network models behave nearly identically if enough hardware resources are available, IP/EON performs much better when fewer electrical optical conversion interfaces are available.