Improving Spectrum Efficiency with Adaptive Regenerations in Elastic Optical Networks

This paper addresses the persistent challenge of optimizing optical transport networks amidst the growing demand for the Internet and bandwidth-intensive services. The focus is to enhance spectrum efficiency through flexgrid chan-nels, presenting heuristic approaches for Routing, Configuration Selection, and Spectrum Allocation (RCSA) with regeneration. Acknowledging the saturation of commercial optical networks in the C-band, the paper proposes two key heuristics, “Upgrade LP with Regeneration” and “LP Blocking Avoidance”, aiming to dynamically reconfigure existing lightpaths to optimize network performance and postponing the higher investment required by Space Division Multiplexing (SDM) solutions. Evaluation in different network topologies demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed methods, showcasing increased throughput, reduced underprovisioning, and improved spectrum utilization. This research contributes valuable insights into ongoing efforts to enhance network efficiency within existing capacity constraints.