Fragmentation-Aware Routing, Core and Spectrum Assignment in Multi-Core Fiber based SDM-EON

The Space Division Multiplexed-Elastic Optical Network (SDM-EON) has many parallel spatial channels, increasing the spectral capacity manifolds. The routing constraints in SDM-EON tend to leave the spectrum fragmented, leading to inefficient resource utilization. This work presents a Fragmentation Aware-resource provisioning technique to mitigate fragmentation effects while keeping the crosstalk-related impairments within thresh-old values. The proposed approach performs better than the benchmark technique in terms of connection blocking ratio and network resource utilization.