Using spectrum management techniques to differentiate services in Elastic Optical Networks

Elastic Optical Networks (EONs) have emerged as a promising solution to cope with the growth and heterogeneity of networks data traffic. Nevertheless, several problems arise in dynamic scenarios, being spectrum fragmentation the most important one. Under a fragmented spectrum, connections with large bandwidth experience higher problems in finding enough free bandwidth to be set-up. In this work, creating spectrum sub-bands dedicated to different types of connections is used to provide different blocking probability values to these sets of connections. By properly adjusting the design and use of these sub-bands, it is possible to tune the network performance attaining different blocking probability (BP) values as a function of the spectrum band division and the priority given to the different connection requests sizes. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that different BP values can be obtained for different classes of traffic which, in turn, are assigned to different connections sizes. The strategies proposed are assessed by means of simulation.