Area-Aware Routing and Spectrum Allocation for the Tidal Traffic Pattern in Metro Optical Networks

With the increasing bandwidth requirements for people and the development of urbanization, the movement of the population in the city (especially the supercity) has an increasing influence on the traffic distribution in both space and time dimensions. The imbalanced distribution results in the regional blocking of different areas in different time periods and reduces the spectrum resource utilization in elastic optical networks. To resolve this problem, this paper proposes a tidal traffic model to formulate a kind of tidal traffic phenomenon firstly. Based on the analysis for this model, the area-aware routing and spectrum allocation algorithm that focuses on the traffic adjustment in specific functional areas is proposed. And two benchmark algorithms named min-hop k-shortest path routing algorithm and occupied-slots-as-weight k-shortest path routing algorithm are introduced. The evaluation results show that, compared to the benchmark algorithms, the proposed area-aware algorithm could reduce the blocking probability efficiently from 2% to 47% with low time complexity.