An Experimental Comparison of Routing and Spectrum Assignment Algorithms in Elastic Optical Networks

Routing and Spectrum Assignment (RSA) is the fundamental problem in Elastic Optical Networks (EONs), which is anNP-complete problem. In this paper, we compare the performances of two typical RSA algorithms namely SpectrumFirst and Route-First, and put forward a connection between the performances and the request distributions. The numerical results demonstrated that even though the Spectrum-First RSA algorithm outperforms significantly the Route-First RSA algorithm under concentrated distribution, the latter performs pretty better under uniform distribution, which is however somewhat different from that demonstrated in the literature.