Abstract

Nowadays, most optical network planning strategies route the users by the shortest paths. However, balancing the network paths may achieve remarkable savings by using network resources as even as possible. In this work, we propose a balancing routing strategy for elastic optical networks (EON) architectures with static network operation, called Bandwidth-Balanced (BB). We compute the connection paths balancing the number of FSUs demanded in all network links, contrary to the users balancing strategies found in the literature. To evaluate our proposal, we perform the Routing, Modulation Level, and Spectrum Assignment problems (RMLSA), taking into account physical-layer impairments (PLI) found in optical communications. Experimental results show that the BB strategy outperforms commonly used strategies in capacity savings and spectral fragmentation.