Optimal Provisioning Strategies for Translucent Elastic Optical Networks

Provisioning strategies for Translucent Elastic Optical Networks (EONs) should consider both spectrum and transponder costs. End-to-end connections that support user demands may be obtained on the one hand via transparent paths, which avoid regeneration costs but may require more spectrum slot, thus increasing the blocking probability, on the other hand via opaque paths that can reduce spectrum requirements, but at the cost of additional transponders for regeneration purposes. In this context, a wise provisioning strategy needs to consider translucent paths that can provide a good trade-off between transparent and opaque solutions. We propose a provisioning strategy that considers a multi-objective optimization problem aiming at the joint minimization of spectrum resources and regenerators. We show that the proposed strategy can significantly reduce regeneration costs while achieving low blocking probability.