Abstract

Bandwidth fragmentation is a critical problem for Elastic Optical Networks (EON), and spectrum defragmentation is the most important strategy to mitigate this phenomenon. In this work we propose a Machine Learning (ML) based method for estimating the Blocking Rate, which, when exceeding a threshold, triggers a defragmentation process. This is done in order to achieve better results in terms of the number of blocking demands and the number of re-routed connections. The performance of the proposed method was compared with two other known strategies: fixed-time (FT) defragmentation, and triggering based on one fragmentation metric (BFR). Simulation results were evaluated using two multi-objective metrics. Experimental results show that the proposed method is more efficient than the other two, being the best method in 85.7% of comparisons using the Pareto Coverage metric, and obtaining 47.4% of non-dominated solutions in the Pareto Front.(c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of The Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).