Elastic optical network virtualization

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Thanks to their unmatched ability to transmit data at high speed over long distances, optical networks are deployed worldwide as the main Internet substrate infrastructure. To cope with the growth of Internet traffic at a rate of 40% annually, optical networks are moving away from the traditional paradigm where fiber spectrum was divided into a grid of equally-spaced channels. In the recently-proposed Elastic Optical Network (EON), an arbitrary number of smaller frequency slots can be assigned to serve traffic demands. This way, EON can flexibly accommodate novel transmission technologies that can elastically tune transmission parameters as baud rate or modulation format. With such enhanced elasticity, virtualization of physical network resources, after having played an important role in the electrical-substrate layer, is now expected to also penetrate the optical domain. This will enable new business models where the traditional network operator is substituted by two independent entities: infrastructure providers, who manage the optical infrastructure, and service providers, who manage virtual networks (VNs) over which they offer end-to-end services to customers. VN provisioning over an EON is the focus of this research proposal. The amount of tunable parameters in an EON is very large and the VN-provisioning problem in its full complexity has not yet been addressed. In this project, we focus on four aspects that are of central importance to EON virtualization, i) scalability, ii) failure resilience, iii) latency guarantees, iv) VN re-optimization. Advances in these research avenues in collaboration with our industrial partner Huawei will have a lasting impact on the design principles of future EONs and maintain Canada in the forefront of optical-network industry.