Spectrum allocation in Band Division Multiplexing – Elastic Optical Networks

Internet traffic will increase between 53% and 73% between the years 2017 and 2022. In this context, there must be an infrastructure capable of supporting this increase. Optical networks are natural physical substrate to support high bandwidth requirements.

The problem occurs in that optical network capacity is not infinite since it has a limit that some researchers in the area have noticed, calling this Capacity Crunch. This limit is mainly given by the accelerated growth of internet speed, which reaches approximately 40% per year. The strategies to solve this problem have focused mainly on two approaches: Improving the efficiency in the use of current resources or increasing the fibre capacity.

Regarding improving fibre capacity, it is a problem attacked by the different resource allocation algorithms and integer linear programming models, which seek to minimise some metric (usually the probability of blocking) to use better the available resources. On the other hand, in terms of increasing fibre capacity, two (complementary) ways of doing it have been proposed: Space Division Multiplexing (SDM) or Band Division Multiplexing (BDM or MB - Multi-band). In SDM technology, a new type of fibre is created with multiple cores, where each core can carry what a fibre would generally carry. On the other hand, in BDM, the unused spectrum is used (bands usually not used). Currently, BDM is just beginning, so many lines can be worked.

This proposal will extend state of art in BDM optical networks in four sub-areas: Heuristics, Optimisation, Data Science, and technological tools.