Gains of anycast demand relocation in survivable elastic optical networks

In this paper, we focus on a survivable elastic optical network (EON) that supports both unicast and anycast traffic demands. The network implements a dedicated path protection scheme (DPP), in which backup lightpaths are assigned to traffic demands so that to protect against single link failures. In a normal network state, each anycast demand is served by a specific data center (DC). However, we consider the possibility to use different DC (i.e., to relocate anycast demand) in case of a failure and, therefore, the backup lightpath does not have to be connected to the same DC. We study three different scenarios in which backup paths are connected to the same DC, different DC and any available DC in the network. The analysis is performed according to two optimization criteria: maximum and average spectrum usage. The results of our investigation show that the relocation process can bring significant spectrum savings, on average up to almost 40%.