Protection lightpath-based hitless spectrum defragmentation for distance adaptive elastic optical networks

Spectrum defragmentation can improve spectrum utilization for an elastic optical network (EON). However, most of the existing studies have focused on defragmentation for working lightpaths, which may affect upper-layer network services. This paper considers protection lightpath-based hitless spectrum defragmentation for distance adaptive elastic optical networks. Without affecting working lightpaths, but defragmenting spectra for protection lightpaths, we expect to achieve truly hitless spectrum defragmentation for an EON. Shared backup path protection (SBPP) technique is employed as a representative network protection technique to evaluate the benefit of the proposed defragmentation scheme. To smooth the network spectra for future arriving lightpath requests so as to reduce bandwidth blocking probability (BBP), we propose two defragmentation triggering mechanisms, namely, defragmentation upon blocking (BTD) and batch defragmentation (BD). For each of them, we also propose two spectrum defragmentation algorithms, namely, defragmentation with sequentially releasing and re-establishing protection lightpaths (SR-D) and defragmentation with jointly releasing and re-establishing protection lightpaths (JR-D). The performances of these proposed algorithms are evaluated from perspectives of BBP and average number of reconfigurations per successfully established lightpath service (ANR). Simulation results show that compared to the case without defragmentation, the proposed scheme is effective to reduce BBP, which trades off with ANR.