A comparison of Elastic and Multi-Rate Optical Networks performance

While Elastic Optical Networks (EONs) have recently emerged as a promising solution to cope with the growth and heterogeneity of data traffic, there are some drawbacks that have attracted the researchers´ attention. One of such flaws is spectrum fragmentation, which has generated many controversial as it imposes huge number of extra actions during network operation. Some intermediate proposals have been disclosed, such as semi-elastic schemes that approach the performance of EONs while keeping the spectral entropy restrained. The purpose of this paper is to present a comparison between EONs and semi-elastic networks, where all the offered connections are allocated using only three different channel rate options. Different spectrum management strategies are introduced and evaluated by means of simulation considering both scenarios.