Group-based spectrum assignment in dynamic flex-grid optical networks

Traditional wavelength switched optical network employing wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) technology, allocates constant spectrum band to different kinds of services, which lacks flexibility in spectrum provisioning and thus reduces the resource utilization efficiency. Flex-grid technology, which introduces a finer spectrum granularity and allocates spectrum to different services flexibly according to their required bandwidth, is considered a promising candidate solution to improve the resource utilization efficiency of an optical network. However, since multiple contiguous spectrum granularities are usually assigned to a single service in such flex-grid optical network, the spectrum continuity and contiguity constraints should always be guaranteed, which may induce spectrum fragmentation. With the accumulation of spectrum fragmentation, available spectrum resources decrease, and this will greatly worsen the performance of the whole network, especially in networking. Therefore, spectrum fragmentation is considered a serious problem in flex-grid optical networks and many schemes have been proposed to solve it. These existing schemes, known as defragmentation, can reduce spectrum fragmentation either by rerouting the lightpath or by reallocating the spectrum for a service, which re-optimizes the spectrum resources. However, in the rerouting or reallocation procedure, existing traffic may be disrupted or extra resources, such as alternative spectrum or expensive spectrum convertors, are needed. None of these schemes can solve spectrum fragmentation with both no disrupted traffic and extra resources. It is because all these schemes utilize remedial methods to solve fragmentation problem and either disrupted traffic or extra resources are the cost when they cope with the defragmented spectrum. Different from all the above schemes, we propose a precautionary method to solve fragmentation problem in this paper. By introducing group-based spectrum assignment algorithm into flex-grid optical networks, spectrum resources are sorted into groups and each spectrum group only accommodates one specific kind of services. Since released spectrum can always be reused by the services of the same kind, spectrum fragmentation is prevented from its generation. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm induces no spectrum fragmentations and is suitable to accommodate high-speed services.