A Novel Hop-distance Sensitive Approach to Elastic Optical Networks
RSA Algorithms
Stathis B. Mavridopoulos
1 a
, Georgia A. Beletsioti
1 b
, Georgios A. Tziroglou
1 c
,
Constantine A. Kyriakopoulos
1 d
, Petros Nicopolitidis
1 e
, Georgios I. Papadimitriou
1 f
and Emmanouel Varvarigos
2 g
1
Department of Informatics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, GR-54124, Greece
2
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Athens, GR-15780, Greece
Keywords: Elastic Optical Networks, Hop Distance, Fairness, Normalized Blocking Probability, Backbone, Metropolitan.
Abstract:
Elastic optical networks (EON) allow great flexibility through finer spectrum allocation granularity when
compared to traditional WDM solutions. Their improved spectrum efficiency makes them a promising solution
for next-generation backbone and metropolitan networks. Distant connections in elastic optical networks that
are routed through multiple hops suffer from increased bandwidth blocking probability (BBP), in contrast to
easier formulation of more direct connections. Traditional BBP as a metric fails to capture this phenomenon.
In this work, a normalization of BP to the connection’s hop distance is proposed and a novel low complexity
algorithm is presented that takes this new metric into consideration. Simulation results show that the proposed
scheme improves network performance and fairness with no deterioration of BBP, when compared to the
FirstFit RSA algorithm.
1 INTRODUCTION
Globally, the IP traffic in telecommunication net-
works has risen at unprecedented levels, expanding
annually at an average rate of 24%, according to Cisco
Global - 2021 Forecast Highlights (Cisco, 2016). Not
only do the number of users increase, but also new,
bandwidth starving applications such as voice over IP,
video on demand, high- definition video and gaming
(Beletsioti et al., 2016).
Traditionally, optical technologies based on
Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) (e.g (Kyr-
iakopoulos et al., 2018b), (Beletsioti et al., 2018)),
which use the conventional fixed grid of 50 GHz and
100 GHz for backbone and metro networks (Sim-
mons, 2014) respectively, have been used to accom-
modate the requested traffic demands. However, to-
day’s extremely high traffic needs threaten to make
a
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7058-3147
b
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1895-094X
c
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5771-1511
d
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7874-2205
e
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5059-3145
f
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9529-9380
g
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4942-1362
the traditional WDM technologies inadequate. Never-
theless, Elastic Optical Networks (EON) in conjunc-
tion with OFDM scheme is assumed to be a promis-
ing technology coping with the increasing and more
diverse traffic demands (Gerstel et al., 2012), (Kyri-
akopoulos et al., 2018a).
EONs offer flexibility in how to allocate just the
appropriate bandwidth capacity to the connections
and are considered the network solution for back-
bone and next generation metropolitan networks. In
flexible grid technologies the spectrum is split into
slots of 6.75 GHz, 12.5 GHz or 25 GHz. These fre-
quency slots (FS) are then combined to create chan-
nels, which are not overlapping due to OFDM’s or-
thogonality condition (Vizca
´
ıno et al., 2012), in order
to serve custom sized bandwidth requests and adapt
to the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of their ar-
rivals during network’s operation.
The main focus of routing and spectrum alloca-
tion assignment EON algorithms (RSA) is that con-
nections are required to satisfy both the continuity and
contiguity frequency constraints (Chatterjee et al.,
2018). Under high traffic loads, requests between dis-
tant nodes may suffer increased blocking rates due
to the fact that these constraints need to be satisfied
Mavridopoulos, S., Beletsioti, G., Tziroglou, G., Kyriakopoulos, C., Nicopolitidis, P., Papadimitriou, G. and Varvarigos, E.
A Novel Hop-distance Sensitive Approach to Elastic Optical Networks RSA Algorithms.
DOI: 10.5220/0007926900710077
In Proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on e-Business and Telecommunications (ICETE 2019), pages 71-77
ISBN: 978-989-758-378-0
Copyright
c
2019 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
71
across multiple links.
Our work demonstrates the fairness problem that
multihop connections face. Satisfying the continu-
ity and contiguity constraint over longer distances be-
comes increasingly harder, when compared to estab-
lishing connections comprising of only a few hops.
To this end, we propose a new metric in this paper, the
normalize to hop-distance Bandwidth Blocking Prob-
ablity (normalized BBP), that takes connection hop-
distance into consideration and its effect on network
performance.
A similar fairness issue is highlighted in (Rosa
et al., 2015), where it is shown that bandwidth
consuming connections are characterized by higher
blocking probability. Finding larger continuous
groups of unoccupied FSs is hard; contiguity exac-
erbates the situation. Light bandwidth requests are
more probable to fit in the spectrum and experience
lower probability of blockage.
Another work that takes interest into connection
distance is (Chatterjee and Oki, 2016). Low index FSs
are affected by dispersion less than high index ones,
meaning that long distance lightpaths suffer more
quality-of-transmission degradation when placed in a
high index FS. By taking this phenomenon into con-
sideration, the number of FSs per connection can be
minimized, leading to improvements for the network
performance. Our work takes a different approach
since it utilizes connection hop-distance instead of the
actual lightpath length.
A low complexity, effective RSA solution that is
used in many works is the FirstFit (FF) algorithm
(Zheng et al., 2010), (Ning and Shen, 2012). Our pro-
posed method, called HopWindows (HW), improves
upon FF by taking hop-distance into consideration.
In Section 2 the motivation for this work is further
explained. Section 3 provides a detailed description
on the operations of the HW algorithm. Finally, in
Section 4 the performance evaluation of our method
is presented. It is shown, that the proposed method
can achieve improvements from 5% up to 36% when
compared to FF against the normalized BBP metric,
for a variety of underlying topologies (metro-mesh,
backbone and metro-ring).
2 MOTIVATION
One of the most commonly used metrics employed
when investigating the performance of elastic opti-
cal networks is bandwidth blocking probability (BBP)
and is calculated as:
Figure 1: Optical backbone network NSFnet, with 14 nodes
and 21 links (Shen and Tucker, 2009).
bbp =
bandwidth blocked
total bandwidth generated
(1)
This metric is undeniably useful, but doesn’t re-
flect the total reality, especially concerning connec-
tions comprising many hops. Depending on the un-
derlying routing algorithm, one or more paths are
available betweeen a pair of nodes. Node connections
that can only be established over more than one inter-
mediate nodes are called high-hop connections. Node
pairs that are neighbors or require only one other in-
termediate nodes are low-hop connections. Minimum
hop distance (conn min hops) is considered in our
method and refers to the minimum hop length of all
allowed paths between two nodes. Neighbor nodes
have a minimum hop distance of one.
Elastic optical networks allow great flexibility and
increased bandwidth utilization, however connections
are required to satisfy both the continuity and contigu-
ity frequency constraints. Since high-hop connections
require free overlapping frequency slots over multiple
links, they suffer from higher blocking probability.
This phenomenon can be observed when BBP is
analyzed per minimum connection hop distance. In-
dicatively, in our simulation of First Fit performance
for the NSFnet topology in Section 4 (Figures 3
and 5), average BBP of all connections for 150 Er-
langs may be 0.06, however BBP for connection with
conn min hops = 1 and 2 is 0.001 and 0.0487 respec-
tively, while BBP exponentially increases in the cases
of conn min hops = 3 and 4, to 0.10 and 0.215 re-
spectively.
3 PROPOSED SCHEME
3.1 HopWindows Scheme
The proposed HopWindows (HW) algorithm is de-
scribed in Algorithm 1. Similarly to the FirstFit
method (Zheng et al., 2010), when a new connection
request is generated, the k shortest paths between
DCNET 2019 - 10th International Conference on Data Communication Networking
72
Algorithm 1: HopWindows.
1 New Connection
Input : conn min hops: minimum number
of hops for this connection
Paths[i]: k3 shortest paths
Paths[i][max util]: Percentage of
FSs in path that are occupied
Paths[i][len]: number of hops for
this path
Paths[i][ f ree slots]: available FSs
on path
masks[conn min hops]: limit FS
according to the mask
2 foreach path Paths do
3 Find a path that fits this connection
4 if path[max util] > 50% then
5 This path is at risk of congestion
6 if path[len] > conn min hops + 1
then
7 continue
8 else
9 apply masks[conn min hops] on
path[ f ree slots]
10 if connection fits in path[ f ree slots] then
11 Apply firstfit for this path
12 return path
Output: Select Path | Reject connection
source and destination are examined for unoccupied
FSs, that are continuous and contiguous. Those free
FSs are stored in the array path[ f ree slots].
The critical step of HW is Line 4, where the pro-
posed method is differentiated from the simple FF
method. In the case of HW, the maximum path uti-
lization is calculated. Each link in that path will have
a different degree of utilization, and maximum path
utilization refers to the utilization of the most “filled”
link in that path. If maximum path utilization is higher
than a threshold, then that path contains a link that is
either a network bottleneck, or simply, the network
offered load is sufficiently high and that path is al-
ready congested. Our investigation suggested that us-
ing 50% for that threshold produces good results.
The next step, when HW mode is enabled for that
connection path, is to examine if the current path is
longer than the shortest in hops from all paths. This
check preemptively disables connections from estab-
lishing “circular” paths and is integral part of our pro-
posed method. A side benefit of this rule, is that con-
nections may select a longer but less occupied path,
1
2
3
4
5
67
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
16
27
28
29
26
Figure 2: Mesh based metropolitan network with 29 nodes
and 41 links (Antoniades et al., 2004).
resulting in a simple load balancing of the network
links.
If the connection is allowed to proceed to Step 9,
then a mask is applied to the path[ f ree slots]. The
form of the mask depends on the minimum hop dis-
tance of the source - destination pair, thus a different
mask is enforced in the case of neighboring nodes,
than in the case of N hop-distant nodes. The en-
forcement of this mask further limits the allowed FSs
for this connection. For example, the meaning of
a mask like mask[1] = [0, 100], is that neighboring
nodes (with hop-distance = 1) are allowed to only use
FSs with index from 0 to 100, disallowing FSs with
index larger than 100. Practically, this limitation may
force some 1-hop connections to be rejected, but re-
serves bandwidth for high hop connects that are un-
derperforming.
After the mask rule is applied to the
path[ f ree slots], the algorithm attempts to place the
connection to the leftmost slot of continuous FSs
that can fit it, similarly to how FF operates. If the
connection fails to fit, the algorithm examines the
next available path or the connection is denied. In
that case the connection is “blocked”.
3.2 Selecting the Hop-distance Masks
A critical component of our method is the form of
the masks utilized in the proposed method. Our
analysis through simulation demonstrates that masks
are unique to each topology employed. There is no
generic rule set that can satisfy multiple and diverse
scenarios, such as those examined in Section 4. Our
suggestion to this problem is to diverge to a good so-
lution by pre-processing.
In order to find a good mask for our proposed
method, a new metric is introduced that our diver-
gence technique attempts to reduce, which is called
A Novel Hop-distance Sensitive Approach to Elastic Optical Networks RSA Algorithms
73
Figure 3: Blocking probability per connection hop distance.
For each load value, the left bar represents FirstFit and right
the HW method. BBP is represented as bar high. Lower
sections of the bars represent the blocking probability of
low hop-distance connections. HW improves upon BBP,
while the largest benefit is on high hop-distance connec-
tions.
Figure 4: Total network traffic load analysis. The dotted bar
represents the FF successful connections, the slashed bar
the HW successful connections, bars with horizontal lines
the FF blocked connections and the crossed bar the HW
blocked connections. Lower sections of the bars represent
the traffic of lower hop-distance connections. HW achieves
more successful 3-hop and 4-hop connections.
normalized bpp and is calculated as:
normalized bbp =
bandwidth blocked · min hops
bandwidth generated · min hops
(2)
In normalized bbp bandwidth block probability is
weighted against the minimum connection distance.
Our rationale behind this parameter, is that long hop
distance connections occupy more FSs in more links,
when compared to more direct connections. If net-
work performance is examined only against BBP, then
a scheme that bans all long connections would super-
ficially perform better. In such a network, if offered
load is sufficiently high, then multiple short connec-
tions could be established in the place of a single long
connection. The BBP performance would seemingly
improve, while in reality, if we apply this scheme to
NSFnet, then all east coast to west coast connections
are disabled.
This metric is an attempt to alleviate the unfair-
ness problem that is present in EONs, when high hop-
distance node pairs struggle to establish connections,
even when the network is superficially operating with
low blocking probability. Utilizing normalized bpp
leads to not only improved network performance, but
also slightly decreases the fairness problem. Ignor-
ing this parameter can lead to the undesired result
of rejecting high hop connections and artificially im-
proving BBP, since then, more low hop connections
would be established. Comparing schemes against
normalized bpp can give additional insights to net-
work performance, since it takes the effect of connec-
tion hop distance into consideration. Our results in
Section 4 demonstrate that our approach not only im-
proves upon this normalized bpp metric, but the ben-
efits can be even observed in the BBP metric (Figures
5 and 6).
Algorithm 2: Calculate masks.
Input : topology: contains the network
topological information
simulation(masks,topology): will
run a simulation and returns the
normalized
bbp
Masks[conn min hops]: limit FS
according to the mask
max f s: maximum FS index
1 masks[i] = [1, max f s] neutral masks
2 norm bbp = simulation(masks,topology)
3 while True do
4 foreach mask Masks do
5 mask[2]– decrease mask
6 new norm bbp =
simulation(mask,topology)
7 if new norm bbp > norm bbp then
8 continue no improvement
9 if the foreach run once without
improvement then
10 break
Output: The Masks[i] used in Alg. 1
The algorithm that calculates the mask is detailed
in Algorithm 2. In order to design masks that mini-
mize normalized bbp, first a baseline is calculated by
using neutral masks for all hop-distances. The neu-
tral mask is in the form of mask[i] = [1, max f sindex],
where i is all possible minimum hop distances for
the network’s nodes. Running a simulation for each
DCNET 2019 - 10th International Conference on Data Communication Networking
74
topology using those neutral masks produces a base-
line normalized bbp. Then, while the simulations
show that this will improve normalized bbp, each
hop distance’s mask is constantly decreased, until we
have solution. The masks used for each topology in
Section 4 are calculated using this method.
4 PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
4.1 Network Topologies Employed
In order to assess the performance of our approach a
simulation environment was implemented to test our
proposed algorithm HW versus the FF algorithm. In
order to demonstrate the benefits of our proposed al-
gorithm in both elastic backbone and next-generation
metropolitan networks, three topologies were exam-
ined. The backbone network we included in our sim-
ulation is NSFNET (Shen and Tucker, 2009), which
consists of 14 nodes and 21 links (Figure 1). A mesh
based network (Antoniades et al., 2004), which con-
sists of 29 nodes and 41 links (Figure 2), and a ring
topology of 16 nodes are also examined, as represen-
tatives of elastic optical metropolitan networks.
As will be demonstrated in the rest of this Section,
our proposed method achieves different gains depend-
ing on the underlying topology. The benefits in the
case of NSFnet and ring topology are in the region of
10 30% in low offered loads, while in the case of
the metro-mesh topology, the highest gain achieved
is 5.5%. Compared to the FF scheme, our method
never underperforms. As our results show, the worst
case performance of HW is at least on par with the FF
method.
4.2 Simulation Parameters
Following the standard settings used in most of the
corpus of EONs, the main characteristics of our sim-
ulation are the following:
Each link in the network consists of two unidirec-
tional fibers. Each fiber contains a maximum of
160 Frequency Slots (FS). This value is typically
used in previous works, and is irrelevant to con-
clusion we derive from our results.
The source and destination nodes of a traffic re-
quest are uniformly selected.
The traffic load is dynamically generated and cal-
culated as λ / µ (Erlang). The interarrival connec-
tion rate λ is constant and equal to 1. The con-
nection duration parameter µ follows a negative
exponential distribution.
Figure 5: Bandwidth blocking probability for the NSF net-
work topology. The proposed method can even improve
upon the BBP metric.
In our implementation of the FF scheme, the pa-
rameter k = 3 for the K-shortest path algorithm.
The connection load follows one of the two rules:
elastic and 4-7-12. In the case of elastic, the con-
nection load is in the range of [2, 15] FSs, includ-
ing guard-band, while the rule 4-7-12 describes
the scenario of three distinct services with re-
quirements of 4 FSs, 7 FSs and 12 FSs, includ-
ing guardbands (Qiu et al., 2016). In both cases,
the load of newly generated connections is cho-
sen uniformly from the allowed values. Similar
results are observed for both traffic profiles. The
average connection load for the elastic traffic is
8.5, while in the case of 4-7-12 is 7.666. This
range of elastic is purposely selected so that the
result lines of both elastic and 4-7-12 in Figures 5-
8 are meaningfully near but not overlapping with
each other.
The simulation ends when simulation time
reaches 10e5 time units.
4.3 Simulation Results
Even though our method primarily focuses on im-
proving the normalized BBP metric, the improved
network operations can even be of benefit to the more
commonly used BBP metric, as can be seen in Figure
5, leading to gains up to 5.5%. When performance
is compared against the normalized BBP parameter
(Figure 6), the gains are more pronounced reaching
up to 36% for low offer load, though gains dimin-
ish with high loads (Table 1). The topology used
in both of those experiments is the NSFnet (Figure
1). The mask employed for this topology, only lim-
its the 1-hop distance connections to 149 FSs. This
group of experiments demonstrates that our method
A Novel Hop-distance Sensitive Approach to Elastic Optical Networks RSA Algorithms
75
Table 1: Numerical results comparison for FF and HW for NSFnet.
Erlangs 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500
FF elastic normalized bbp 0.105 0.215 0.309 0.39 0.455 0.507 0.55 0.587
HW elastic normalized bbp 0.0832 0.192 0.295 0.376 0.441 0.497 0.541 0.577
gains percentage 26.5 11.4 4.9 4 3 1.95 1.81 1.81
FF 4-7-12 normalized bbp 0.08 0.181 0.273 0.352 0.419 0.47 0.51 0.55
HW 4-7-12 normalized bbp 0.058 0.155 0.257 0.336 0.405 0.461 0.50 0.54
gains percentage 36.4 16.79 6.2 4.82 3.58 2.03 1.97 1.34
Figure 6: Normalized bandwidth blocking probability for
the NSF network topology.
will improve the performance of a typical backbone
network, when compared to the FF algorithm. Simi-
lar improvements are observed in both the elastic and
4-7-12 traffic profiles.
The NSFnet topology is also used in the results
displayed in Figures 3 and 4. Those Figures give a
detailed image on BBP per N-hop connection for the
former and on the amount of successful/blocked con-
nection per N-hop connection for the latter. Those
results demonstrate both the unfairness that high-hop
connections face and the improvements HW achieves.
Those improvements are more pronounced in com-
parably “low” offered loads, which are also the most
interesting, since a real world scenario will operate
within those ranges of low BBP (a network with 50%
BBP is unresponsive and unrealistic).
Similar results are achieved in both the cases of
the mesh based network (Figure 2) and the ring topol-
ogy of 15 nodes. In both of those topologies, the
mask algorithm limits bandwidth for the 1-hop and
2-hop connections. In the case of the mesh network
(Figure 7), 1-hop connections are limited to 113 FSs
and 2-hop connection are limited to 149 FSs, while
larger hop connections are allow to use the whole
bandwidth. The maximum hop-distance is 6. In the
case of the ring network (Figure 8), 1-hop connections
are limited to 137 FSs and 2-hop connections to 125
FSs. In this topology, the maximum hop-distance is
Figure 7: Normalized bandwidth blocking probability for
the metro network topology.
Figure 8: Normalized bandwidth blocking probability for
the ring network topology.
8. Our experiments show that the ring topology ben-
efits more than the mesh topology when utilizing the
proposed algorithm.
5 CONCLUSIONS
In this work we propose the utilization of the new
metric bandwidth blocking probability normalized to
connection hop distance, or normalized BBP. Our
analysis and the new, weighed probability metric shed
DCNET 2019 - 10th International Conference on Data Communication Networking
76
light on the intrinsic problem that multihop connec-
tions face in elastic optical networks. High hop con-
nections are harder to satisfy the continuity and con-
tiguity constraints of elastic optical networks, leading
to unfairness and performance deterioration.
Our proposed algorithm achieves up to 10% gains
in BBP when compared to the FirstFit scheme, by
limiting low-hop connections in certain paths and by
preemptively blocking non-shortest-hop connections
when the path utilization is high. Our low complex-
ity algorithm leads to performance improvements that
are shown to be without negative trade-offs.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This research has been cofinanced by the Euro-
pean Union and Greek national funds through the
Operational Program Competitiveness, Entrepreneur-
ship and Innovation, under the call RESEARCH-
CREATE-INNOVATE (project code:T1EDK-05061).
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