Elastic Optical Networks: Emerging Approach for Effective Spectrum Provisioning

This paper provides motivation for the approach of Elastic Optical Network (EON) for spectrum provisioning. The tremendous growth of traffic for internet data, multimedia services need a high capacity of bandwidth. Unpredictable sources of the traffic of the content providers over the Internet fueled the demand of the flexible optical networks. Earlier simple on-off modulation was used but EON uses adaptive modulation schemes, it leads to an increase in efficiency of spectrum. Fix wavelength grid is unable to cop up with 400 Gb/s and above and so EON comes into the picture, which consists of flexible switches and transceivers. In this paper, we discuss this new emerging technique and the problem of Routing and Spectrum Assignment (RSA) for proper spectrum utilization.