Dynamic Service Provisioning of Advance Reservation Requests in Elastic Optical Networks

The elastic optical network (EON) based on the optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (O-OFDM) technology is a promising candidate for accommodating the uncertainty and heterogeneity of the traffic across future Internet. Advance reservation (AR) is essential to support initial-delay-tolerant services, such as e-science and grid computing, which are making significant contributions to the Internet traffic. Therefore, we expect that it is necessary for future EONs to support AR requests. In this paper, we study dynamic service provisioning of AR requests in EONs. These AR requests permit certain initial-delay during setting-up, as long as the resources are allocated before a preset deadline. We propose several algorithms that combine request scheduling in the time domain with routing, modulation and spectrum assignment (RMSA) in the spectrum domain. Specifically, with the combination of a routing path selection policy and a request scheduling strategy, the algorithm constructs a weight matrix for each pending AR request and provisions the request with it. We design numerical simulations to investigate the algorithms´ performance in terms of three metrics, i.e., blocking probability, average spectrum efficiency, and average initial-delay. Based on the simulation results and computational complexity analysis, we provide suggestions on how to choose routing path selection policy and request scheduling strategy for provisioning AR requests dynamically in EONs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to address dynamic service provisioning of AR requests in EONs.