On the Efficiency and Quality of Protection of Preprovisioning in Elastic Optical Networks

The study of protection techniques, such as pre-provisioning (off-line) and provisioning (on-line), has been explored in several ways in the optical network literature. In the new Elastic Optical Network (EON) paradigm, the pre-provisioning techniques were still little explored. Preprovisioning implies the prior allocation of resources in the network for the transport and protection of future connection demands, while the provisioning implies the allocation of resources when the demand arrives in the network. Applying preprovisioning reduces the downtime experienced by a connection after a failure, which will reduce unavailability and potentially avoid penalties for violation of Service Level Agreements (SLA) established with client networks. This work aims to explore the main protection techniques and evaluate their efficient in the EON scenario. The performance evaluation show that the use of preprovisioning techniques are more efficient, significantly reducing the network unavailability and bandwidth usage in EON networks. Our solution has an unavailability 40 times lower than shared solutions being only 4% above the optimum.