Routing and Spectrum Allocation in Spectrum-Sliced Elastic Optical Path Networks: A Primal-Dual Framework

Abstract

The recent decade has witnessed a tremendous growth of Internet traffic, which is expected to continue climbing for the foreseeable future. As a new paradigm, Spectrum-sliced Elastic Optical Path (SLICE) networks promise abundant (elastic) bandwidth to address the traffic explosion, while bearing other inherent advantages including enhanced signal quality and extended reachability. The fundamental problem in SLICE networks is to route each traffic demand along a lightpath with continuously and consecutively available sub-carriers, which is known as the Routing and Spectrum Allocation (RSA) problem. Given its NP-Hardness, the solutions to the RSA problem can be classified into two categories: optimal solutions using link-based, path-based, and channel-based Integer Linear Programming (ILP) models, which require extensive computational time; and sub-optimal heuristic and meta-heuristic algorithms, which have no guarantee on the solution quality. In this work, inspired by a channel-based ILP model, we propose a novel primal-dual framework to address the RSA problem, which can obtain a near-optimal solution with guaranteed per-instance closeness to the optimal solution.