Fragmentation-aware service provisioning for advance reservation multicast in SD-EONs

In this paper, we study the service provisioning schemes for dynamic advance reservation (AR) multicast requests in elastic optical networks (EONs). We first propose several algorithms that can handle the service scheduling and routing and spectrum assignment (RSA) of AR multicast requests jointly, including an integrated two-dimensional fragmentation-aware RSA (2D-FMA) that can alleviate the 2D fragmentation caused by light-tree provisioning. Then, we leverage the idea of software-defined EONs (SD-EONs) that utilizes OpenFlow (OF) in the control plane to demonstrate and evaluate the proposed algorithms. Specifically, we build an SD-EON control plane testbed, implement the algorithms in it, and perform control plane experiments on dynamic AR multicast provisioning. The results indicate that 2D-FMA achieves the best blocking performance and provides the shortest average setup delay.