Deadlock avoidance under incremental traffic in the elastic single link

The paper investigates the conditions that lead to deadlocked resources in a single link that services an incremental traffic of requests for a variable number of contiguous slots. The paper shows that such deadlocks result from a mismatch between the traffic profile and the number of available slots for assignment in a spectral void. For each traffic profile with no demand for single slots, a set of forbidden void sizes that inevitably lead to deadlock is identified, so deadlock-avoiding spectrum assignment algorithms must avoid them whenever starting from a non-forbidden void size.