ABSTRACT
The flex-grid technology or elastic optical network (EON) is accepted to be a promising solution for the future transport network due to its amazing properties. The software-defined network (SDN) is incorporated with the emerging technology of EONs for enhancing its performance. The major difference between traditional SDN and software-defined (SD)-EON architectures is due to the network elements that form the data plane. Typically, bandwidth-variable transponders and switching components are used to build the data plane of SD-EON. The chapter presents the architecture of SD-EONs, which is based on hopretuning. It investigates the performances of EONs in terms of blocking probability, traffic admissibility, and network’s contiguous-aligned available slot ratio related to SDN functionalities. The chapter discusses the related works on software-defined optical networks, network virtualization, and different resource allocation schemes related to SD-EONs. The performance of optical networks with or without SDN mainly depends on resource allocation schemes.
