Static routing and spectrum allocation method for design of low-power elastic optical networks with multifiber environments

Abstract

This paper proposes a static Routing and Spectrum Allocation (RSA) method to design low-power elastic optical networks. In the elastic optical networks, data are transmitted via lightpaths, which are routes flexibly assigned frequency resources according to transmission distances and traffic demands. When designing the elastic optical networks with a static lightpath establishment policy, lightpaths are generally established so as to minimize frequency bandwidth allocated in order to save frequency resources necessary for constructing the networks. The proposed method focuses on not only this performance metric but also the power consumption of optical amplifiers. An optical amplifier in an optical fiber works when any of optical signals pass through it, and thus in multifiber environments where each link consists of multiple optical fibers, lightpaths should be collectively amplified from the view point of the power efficiency. Therefore, the relationship between these two performance metrics is a trade-off. The proposed method develops an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation for the RSA problem taking the trade-off into account. Furthermore, the proposed method provides a heuristic algorithm that performs route selection and frequency spectrum allocation for reducing the total power consumption of optical amplifiers while saving necessary frequency resources. Through numerical experiments, we show the performance of the proposed method.