Control Plane Strategies for Elastic Optical Networks

The goal of this Ph.d. project is to present and address selected challenges related to the increasing traffic demand and limited available capacity in core optical fiber infrastructure in parallel with tighter requirements of reducing energy consumption and operational costs. Elastic Optical Networks (EONs) concept is proposed as a solution to enable a more flexible handling of the optical capacity and allows an increase of available capacity over the existing optical infrastructure. One main requirement for enabling EONs is to have a flexible spectrum structure (i.e.Flex-Grid) which allows the spectrum to be used as an on-demand resource. Flex-Grid raises new challenges for controlling the dynamic spectrum slots environment. This thesis addresses, as part of the Celtic project “Elastic Optical Networks” (EONet), the control of Flex-Grid architectures by extending the capabilities of a GMPLS (Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching)-based control framework in accordance with existing IETF standards and recommendations. The usual approach of extending capacity in transport networks by incrementally adding more optical resources results in a very inefficient usage and determines a high power consumption. EONs offer the opportunity of deploying energy efficiency strategies, which benefit from the flexible nature of elastic optoelectronic devices. This thesis proposes and investigates different approaches for reducing power consumption based on EONs in realistic dynamic traffic scenarios.