A Vectored Fragmentation Metric for Elastic Optical Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new vectored fragmentation metric for elastic optical networks that effectively characterizes both link and path spectrum fragmentation, aiding in network management and reducing connection blocking.

Contribution

It proposes a novel vectored fragmentation metric that captures both types of spectrum fragmentation in elastic optical networks, improving network performance analysis.

Findings

The metric characterizes fragmentation in both transient and steady states.

It performs well across various connection request granularities, arrival rates, and holding times.

Compared to link-based metrics, it provides a better representation of spectrum fragmentation.

Abstract

When circuits are set up and dismantled dynamically in elastic optical networks, spectrum tends to become fragmented in the fiber links. The fragmentation limits the available path choices and may lead to significant blocking of connection requests. There are two types of fragmentation in the network spectrum in the links due to contiguity constraints and over the paths due to continuity. Study of fragmentation and its management is essential to operate the networks efficiently. This paper proposes a vectored fragmentation metric for characterizing the fragmentation, which covers both types of fragmentation. We discuss the characteristics of this metric in both transient and steady-state of the dynamic network. We also test the proposed metric for connection requests granularity range, arrival rates and holding times, to establish functionality of this metric. We also compare the link-based fragmentation metric with our Vectored Fragmentation Metric to understand the better representation.