Joint anycast and unicast routing for elastic optical networks: Modeling and optimization

Anycast communication is gaining much interest due to the deployment and the growing importance of new network services, including Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and grid/cloud computing, among others. Concurrently, elastic optical networks (EONs), being a very promising solution for future optical transport networks, are considered as effective and cost-efficient approach for supporting such bandwidth-demanding applications. In this article, we focus on anycast communication in EON. Specifically, we formulate a joint anycast and unicast Routing and Spectrum Allocation (RSA/JAU) off-line optimization problem and solve it by means of both Integer Linear Programming (ILP) and dedicated heuristic algorithms. We evaluate the performance of algorithms and assess the effectiveness of anycast communication under various network scenarios. The main conclusion is that anycast routing brings significant spectrum savings in EON.