Spectrum and Waveband Assignment in Elastic Optical Waveband Networks

Elastic optical networks can increase spectral efficiency by assigning a variable amount of spectral resources to satisfy a traffic request, instead of the fixed amount of spectrum as allocated by current fixed grid optical networks. Waveband networks reduce the number of optical switch ports by aggregating lightpaths into a waveband, and switching them with a single waveband port. The authors formulate the waveband selection, spectrum allocation, and waveband assignment problem in an elastic optical waveband network that supports a fixed number of waveband sizes. They propose heuristics to select waveband sizes and study the effect of the number of waveband sizes on the number of optical switch ports.