Classes of Service Defined by Soft Trunk Reservation Technique in Elastic Optical Networks

Elastic Optical Network (EON) is a very promising architecture where services of several bandwidth demands coexist. Without suitable management of spectrum, the natural behaviour is that services with wider bandwidth requests suffer higher blocking rates than services with narrower ones. One of techniques to deal with this problem, reaching fairness, is the Trunk Reservation (TR). However, TR can severely degrade the overall network performance depending on the operation scenario. In this work, we present a new variant of TR, called Soft Trunk Reservation (STR), to improve the network fairness level with smaller impact on the general network performance. We also show that STR technique can be used to define different classes of service considering the conventional EON operation.