Energy Efficiency in Sliceable-Transponder Enabled Elastic Optical Networks

The Sliceable Bandwidth-Variable Transponder (SBVT) enables greater flexibility in elastic optical networks (EON), providing energy efficiency and reducing the resource wastage. Another feature offered by SBVTs is the ability to perform optical grooming. Along with electric grooming and a multilevel adaptive modulation, it provides many possibilities in dynamic traffic engineering. A key problem is how to coordinate all these features while promoting energy efficiency and good network performance. In this paper, an unprecedented integer linear programming (ILP) model is developed to optimally solve this problem. The model covers all traffic engineering characteristics in translucent SBVT enabled EONs with electrical and optical grooming for dynamic traffic scenarios. Due to the non-scalability of the ILP model, a corresponding heuristic algorithm based on the auxiliary graph (AG) model is proposed. It can support various traffic engineering policies for different purposes by adjusting the weights of AG edges. Comprehensive comparisons are performed for the ILP model, the AG heuristic, and other online algorithms from the literature. Numerical results show that the AG heuristic provides a gain of two orders of magnitude in the bandwidth blocking ratio and achieves a gain of up to 51% in energy efficiency compared to literature proposals.