Fast spectrum exhaustion under incremental traffic in the elastic single link

The paper discusses the mean time to exhaust the spectrum of a single link under an incremental traffic of requests for connections with a variable number of slots. It is shown that optimal assignment policies exist under awareness of the traffic profile. For instance, if the traffic rates decrease with the number of requested slots, greedy policies that accept all requests that may be accommodated will speed up the spectrum exhaustion. On the other hand, if the traffic rates increase with the number of requested slots, spectrum exhaustion is favored by wholesale policies that accept only requests for the entire available spectrum. An optimal algorithm is derived for any given traffic profile.