Spectrum-sliced elastic optical networking

Current communication environments present a wide range of traffic granularities, making it hard to use the optical spectrum efficiently under the WDM framework. In elastic networking, the WDM rigid frequency grid is replaced by a more flexible structure, in which the spectrum is organized in frequency slots, and each traffic flow is assigned to an appropriate set of contiguous slots. The classical RWA problem is then replaced by a Routing and Spectrum assignment (RSA) problem, which presents different characteristics when compared to the former. In this paper, we discuss a novel approach to tackle the spectrum assignment problem in elastic networks.