Network coding-based protection scheme for elastic optical networks

Optical technologies are the foundations supporting the current telecommunication network backbones due to the high speed transmissions achieved in fiber optical networks. Traditional optical networks consist of a fixed 50 GHz grid, resulting in a low optical spectrum (OS) utilization, specifically with transmission rates above 100 Gbps. This issue is magnified when network resilience capabilities are required. For instance, proactive protection solutions such as Dedicated Protection (DP) are widely used because of their low recovery time. However, a significant drawback of DP is its high utilization of optical bandwidth. Recently, optical networks are undergoing significant changes with the purpose of providing a flexible grid that can fully exploit the potential of optical networks. This has led to a new network paradigm termed as Elastic Optical Networks (EON). Moreover, a novel strategy referred to as network coding (NC) has been proposed with the aim of improving network throughput. In this paper, we propose a proactive protection scheme so-called E-DPNC that combines both the advantages concerning network throughput offered by EON and NC, and the low recovery time of a DP scheme, in order to enable network resilience against optical link failures while also reducing the optical spectrum utilization. Our evaluation results show that our solution reduces the OS utilization by 41% compared with conventional protection schemes deployed on fixed grid scenarios.