| Abstract: | Elastic optical networks (EON) have emerged as a solution to the growing needs of the future internet, by allowing for greater flexibility, spectrum efficiency, and scalability, when compared to WDM solutions. EONs achieve those improvements through finer spectrum allocation granularity. However, due to the continuity and contiguity constrains, distant connections that are routed through multiple hops suffer from increased bandwidth blocking probability (BBP), while more direct connections are easier to form. This paper proposes HopWindows, a novel method that strategically allocates bandwidth to connections based on their hop distance. This new algorithm applies masks that control the range of frequency slots (FSs) allocated to each n‐hop connection. Furthermore, a new network metric is introduced, the normalized bandwidth blocking probability (normalized BBP). Utilization of this metric ensures increased fairness to distant connections. Extended simulation results are presented which indicate that the proposed HopWindows method achieves a superior performance over the well‐known FirstFit algorithm. The proposed algorithm may achieve a decrease in bandwidth blocking probability of up to 50%. |
