Does fragmentation avoidance improve the performance of dynamic spectrum allocation in elastic optical networks?

Most spectrum allocation algorithms in elastic optical networks apply a greedy approach: A new connection is allocated as long as there are enough spectrum slots to accommodate it. Recently, a different approach was proposed. Named Deadlock–Avoidance (DA), it only establishes a new connection if the portion of spectrum left after allocating it is zero (full-link utilization) or is big enough to accommodate future requests. Otherwise, the connection request is blocked as a way to avoid fragmentation. The performance of DA has been evaluated in a single-link scenario, where its performance is not affected by the slot continuity constraint. In this paper, we evaluate for the first time the blocking performance and fragmentation level of DA in a fully dynamic network scenario with different bitrates and number of slots for a single link, a 4-node bus and a mesh topology. The performance was evaluated by simulation, and a lower bound was also derived using a continuous Markov chain model. Results are obtained for DA and three greedy algorithms: First Fit, Exact Fit and First–Last Fit. Results show that DA significantly decreases fragmentation, and thus, it exhibits a much lower blocking due to fragmentation than the greedy algorithms. However, this decrease is compensated by a new type of blocking due to the selective acceptance of connections. As a result, the extra computational complexity of DA does not compensate a gain in performance.