Multipath Routing and Spectrum Allocation for Network Coding Enabled Elastic Optical Networks

The benefits of network coding in all-optical multicast networks have been widely demonstrated. In this paper, we mainly discuss the multicast service efficiently provisioning problem in the network coding enabled elastic optical networks (EONs). Although most research on routing and spectrum allocation (RSA) has been widely studied in the elastic optical networks (EONs), rare research studies RSA for multicast in the network coding enabled EON, especially considering the time delay constraint. We propose an efficient heuristic algorithm, called Network Coding based Multicast Capable-Multipath Routing and Spectrum Allocation (NCMC-MRSA) to solve the multipath RSA for multicast services in the network coding enabled EON. The well-known layered graph approach is utilized for NCMC-MRSA, and two request ordering strategies are utilized for multiple multicast requests. From the simulation results, we observe that the proposed algorithm NCMC-MRSA performs more efficient spectrum utilization compared with the benchmark algorithms. NCMC-MRSA utilizing the spectrum request balancing (SRB) ordering strategy shows the most efficient spectrum utilization performance among other algorithms in most test networks. Note that we also observe that the efficiency of NCMC-MRSA shows more obvious than the benchmark algorithm in large networks. We also conduct the performance comparisons of two request ordering strategies for NCMC-MRSA. Besides, we also evaluate the impact of the number of the linkdisjoint parallel w paths on the spectrum utilization performance of the proposed algorithm NCMC-MRSA. It is interesting to find that the change of the parameter w in a certain range has a significant impact on the performance of NCMC-MRSA. As the parameter w increases to a certain value, the performances of NCMC-MRSA cannot be affected by the change of w any more.