Spectrum management in heterogeneous bandwidth networks

As optical network continues to evolve, lightpaths will take on different spectrum spaces as opposed to current uniform 50-GHz grid. While lightpaths of heterogeneous bandwidths co-exist, two factors emerge that will degrade the provisioning efficiency and negatively impact its sustainable evolution: 1) unfairness of access among different bandwidth connections, and 2) spectrum fragmentation caused by bandwidth mismatch. Through analysis and simulations, we show that a spectrum management method that partitions resources for dedicated usage by different bandwidth lightpaths achieves better provisioning efficiency by resolving these two problems.