Migration From Fixed to Flexible Grid Optical Networks With Sub-Band Virtual Concatenation

A novel strategy is presented to operate a mixed fixed/flexible grid optical network which may be used to gradually migrate from a fixed to a flexible mode of operation. Routing and spectrum allocation (RSA) in an optical network where fixed and flexible grids co-exist using a multi-path sub-band virtual concatenation (VCAT) or split spectrum (SS) technique is considered. Mixed integer linear programming models and an efficient heuristic algorithm based on spectrum window planes are proposed for the RSA optimization. The results obtained for the static traffic demand indicate that it is operationally more convenient to use the multi-path VCAT only by itself in a mixed grid optical network to guarantee performance comparable to that of the joint multi-path and single-path VCAT case. Network performance is also evaluated in terms of bandwidth blocking probability (BBP) under a dynamic traffic demand. Simulation results show that the multi-path VCAT scheme can efficiently utilize the overall spectrum resources with low blocking. The results of studies with both static and dynamic traffic demands also confirm that migration from a pure fixed grid optical network to a pure flexible grid will be desirable for better network capacity utilization.