Dynamic continuous and non-continuous advance reservation in SLICE networks

Today, large amounts of data, growing from terabytes to petabytes, need to be transferred across the globe in a timely manner. To accommodate this efficiently, network operators are augmenting their networks to 100 Gbps links and beyond. The spectrum-sliced elastic optical path network (SLICE) architecture enables accommodation of variable-rate data traffic in a highly spectrum-efficient manner. The blocking in SLICE networks observed in literature is much lower than on traditional fixed grid WDM networks. Still, the current routing and spectrum allocation (RSA) algorithms have potential for blocking performance improvements. To increase the spectral efficiency, we introduce a concept called routing, spectrum, and segment allocation (RSSA). We propose several novel continuous and non-continuous time heuristics based on the concept of RSSA. We consider dynamic advance reservation traffic requests over SLICE networks and evaluate the performance of the proposed RSSA heuristics. Through extensive simulations, we observe that our continuous-time, non-contiguous spectrum RSSA heuristics outperform existing heuristics in terms of both blocking probability and spectral utilization.