DYNAMIC MULTICAST SPECTRUM (Re) ALLOCATION USING SHARED BACKUP PATH IN ELASTIC OPTICAL NETWORKS

The routing and spectrum allocation (RSA) problem in elastic optical networks (EON) is to first find a path for a connection request and then allocate a frequency slot to it. Due to spectrum continuity and contiguity constraints, some available frequency slots cannot be allocated to connection requests. In this case, one solution is to reassign slot to some existing connections to accept new ones. However, most current reallocation schemes are proposed for unprotected connections. With the very high throughput of connections in EONs (Tb/s per link), the requirement for connection protection is becoming standard. In this paper, we examine a frequency slot reallocation approach for protected multicast connections. The proposed approach allows the reallocation of available and already used slots by temporarily using the protection resources. The experimental results show an average blocking probability of 10% lower than reallocation with hoptuning and the conventional MC-RSA algorithm.