Spectrum Continuity and Contiguity based Dedicated Protection for Flexible Optical Networks

Abstract Elastic optical networks (EONs) have been pointed out as a promising candidate for transporting data with high transmission rates in adaptive optical networks. Consequently, the occurrence of a failure in a simple element may cause the interruption of various services. Survival mechanisms have been crucial to try to overcome the problems created by possible failures. In this paper, we propose a new dedicated path protection mechanism for link-failure survivability in EONs, referred to as Spectrum Continuity and Contiguity based Dedicated Protection (SCCDP). SCCDP tries to avoid the trap topology problem in search for a link-disjoint route pair. In addition, the calculation of the link-disjoint routes is based on modified version of the Dijkstra's algorithm, referred to as Spectrum Continuity and Contiguity based Shortest Path (SCCSP), which chooses the pair of routes according to the end-to-end spectrum continuity and contiguity. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared to other well-known algorithms in the Literature. Two different network topologies are used in our simulations for comparison purposes. Our proposal achieved better results concerning blocking probability.