Elastic Bandwidth Allocation in Flexible OFDM-Based Optical Networks

Abstract

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has recently been proposed as a modulation technique for optical networks, because of its good spectral efficiency, flexibility, and tolerance to impairments. We consider the planning problem of an OFDM optical network, where connections are provisioned for their requested rate by elastically allocating spectrum using a variable number of OFDM subcarriers and choosing an appropriate modulation level taking into account the transmission distance. Using algorithms developed in our previous works, we evaluate the spectrum utilization gains that can be obtained by utilizing the elastic bandwidth allocation of OFDM, when compared to a traditional WDM network.