Smart Provisioning of Sliceable Bandwidth Variable Transponders in Elastic Optical Networks

Prior provisioning of optical source technologies have techno-economic importance for the operator during the design and planning of optical network architectonics. Advancement towards the latest technology paradigm such as Elastic Optical Networks (EONs) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) open a gateway for a flexible and re-configurable optical network architecture. In order to achieve the required degree of flexibility, a flexible and dynamic behaviour is required both at the control and data plane. In this regards, SDN-enabled flexible optical transceivers are proposed to provide the required degree of flexibility. Sliceable Bandwidth Variable Transponders (SBVTs) is one of the recent type of flexible optical transceivers. Based on the type/technology of optical carrier source, the SBVTs are categorized into two types; Multi-Laser SBVT (ML-SBVT) and Multi-wavelength SBVT (MW-SBVT). Both architectures have their own pros and cons when it comes to accommodate traffic request. In this paper, we propose a selection model for the SBVTs before its actual deployment in the network. The selection model consider various design and planning phase network characteristics. In addition to this selection model, the comparison of centralized Flex-OCSM architecture is also presented with the already discussed SBVT types. The analysis in this work is performed on random network (20 nodes) and the German Network (17 nodes).