Fast Energy-Efficient Design in Elastic Optical Networks Based on Signal Overlap

Abstract

The flexible nature of elastic optical networks allows advanced resource management. Algorithms facilitating the procedure of resource allocation can provide connectivity that is energy-efficient. Also, the network's performance is slightly affected and remains at a high level. There are innovative developments during the last years concerning the physical layer that increase the performance even further. Such a technique which provides spectrum sharing is called Signal Overlap. Specifically, the modulation includes two independent data flows that rely on the same spectrum resources and propagate combined in the optical fiber. When energy-efficient algorithms are designed to exploit the Signal Overlap technique for building the virtual topology of the network, less energy-consuming components operate in the network. This procedure also preserves the performance at a stable level. In this paper, the Signal Overlap technique is used to design a new algorithm that increases energy efficiency in elastic optical networks. To the best of authors' knowledge, it is the first time that the Signal Overlap technique is used for that purpose. Also, the execution time is low upon mid-to-large topologies, so the algorithm is candidate for real-time execution.

Keywords

• Backbone
• elastic networks
• energy-efficiency
• metro
• RSA
• signal overlap