Abstract

The day to day improvement of bandwidth hungry applications such as video streaming,
video gaming and many more has lead to more stringent requirements on networks.
These requirements have generated a significant shift from the traditional fixed-grid Wavelength
Division Multiplexing (WDM) networks to flexible-grid Elastic Optical networks
(EONs). Flexible-grid EONs have brought in new ways for allocating spectrum in an efficient
manner. Unfortunately, they have also brought in new challenges with respect to
spectrum allocation. It is much more complex to grant demands in flexible-grid EONs, as
they take into account more constraints than traditional fixed-grid WDM networks. Despite the effort that has been made by the research community to handle those constraints separately, very little has been done tackling them simultaneously, and under realistic scenarios.
In this thesis, we propose two meta-heuristic algorithms for allocating demands in flexible grid EONs while simultaneously taking into accounts all the constraints. Our algorithms are tested on small and large networks, with heavy load. Experimental results show that our algorithms perform quite well on all the instances that were selected.