Crosstalk-Avoid Virtual Optical Network Embedding Over Elastic Optical Networks With Heterogeneous Multi-Core Fibers

With the advent of the era of the 5th generation fixed networks (F5G), some bandwidth-hungry services such as 4K/8K video, telemedicine, and virtual reality (VR) gaming are emerging, which will bring more challenges to the optical network. Typically, both flexible bandwidth allocation and dynamic services deployment will encounter a bottleneck when huge volumes of access data are flooded. To break it, virtual optical network embedding (VONE) over the space division multiplexing (SDM) based elastic optical network (EON) using multi-core fiber (MCF) is adopted. However, the problem of inter-core crosstalk (IC-XT) between two adjacent cores in an MCF link has not been solved. In this paper, we first design a heterogeneous MCF (HMCF) structure. The IC-XT can be significantly reduced when virtual networks are embedded over EONs with HMCF. Then some integer linear programming (ILP) models are established to formulate the process of VONE over EONs with HMCF. Next, to avoid the high time complexity of ILP, we propose a novel VONE algorithm supporting joint IC-XT-avoid cores and frequency slots assignment in EONs with HMCF. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can effectively improve 72% of the available frequency ratio (AFR) and reduce 35% of the fragmentation ratio (FR) compared with conventional VONE over MCF-based networks without any IC-XT reducing strategy, which squeezes more bandwidth resources.