Provisioning in elastic optical networks with non-disruptive defragmentation

How serious is spectrum fragmentation in an elastic optical network? It is addressed by the significant provisioning gain achievable by eliminating a particular kind of fragmentation, namely, one that could be removed by Hitless Optical Path Shift (HOPS), a non-disruptive defragmentation method. An intelligent provisioning framework, along with a series of HOPS-based defragmentation methods, presents a “win-win” solution, in which higher service-acceptance rate is achieved at a lower reconfiguration cost.