Core and Spectrum Allocation Based on Association Rules Mining in Spectrally and Spatially Elastic Optical Networks

The combination of space division multiplexing technology with elastic optical networks allows to overcome the possible capacity crunch in backbone networks and also improves network flexibility by jointly managing spectral and spatial resources. However, against this background implemented by multi-core fibers, the interaction between spatial modes will appear as signal crosstalk, thereby affecting the service’s transmission quality. Spectrum resources without crosstalk are always preferred for the services to guarantee quality of service, possibly resulting in the spectrum fragmentation. Conversely, if resources with crosstalk are selected for services to reduce fragments, it may lead to serious crosstalk on the services already carried in the adjacent cores. To achieve a tradeoff between these two factors, this paper firstly exploits the association rule mining method to quantitatively analyze the potential correlation between them. By executing FP-growth mining algorithm, rules not beneficial to service provisioning will be filtered out. Then, an association rules-based core and spectrum assignment algorithm is presented, considering transmission requirements for different levels of services. Simulation results indicate the presented strategy can decrease the proportion of services affected by crosstalk and also reduce the possibility of fragments generation. Additionally, it can effectively make improvement on the blocking and resource utilization.