Design and control in elastic optical networks: Issues, challenges, and research directions

The rapid growth in world-wide communications and the rapid adoption of the Internet has significantly modified our way of life. The traffic behavior is changing rapidly and the increasing mobility of traffic sources makes grooming more complex. To fulfill the needs of the future Internet, optical transmission and networking technologies are moving toward to the goals of greater efficiency, flexibility, and scalability. Recently, elastic optical networks (EONs), which adopt flexgrid technology, have been shown to be a promising candidate for future high-speed optical communication. An EON has the potential to allocate spectrum to lightpaths according to the bandwidth requirements of clients. This paper presents the EON, and provides possible scopes for the future research. Finally, the paper addresses a number of research challenges and open issues presented by elastic networks.