Sliding Scheduled Lightpath Establishment for Time-Continuous Demands with Slotted Wavelength-Switching

Critical data transmissions are often scheduled hours or days in advance of the actual acquirement of network resources, allowing for efficient allocation and scheduling among a set of competing or temporally overlapping lightpath demands. Many periodic applications may not only desire service at some future time, but may further require repeatable and predictable scheduling services. Typically, such application demands are deadline-driven and therefore mutable within some sliding window depending on congestion, competition, or load. This paper considers Sliding Scheduled Lightpath Establishment (SSLE) in time-slotted optical networks and enhances scheduling by incorporating spectral flexibility at wavelength/time-slot granularity. A novel wavelength-switching integer linear program and two conservative heuristics are presented to describe and evaluate the SSLE problem under various degrees of temporal conflict and flexibility.