How Much can Flexible Ethernet and Elastic Optical Networking Benefit Mutually?

In this paper, we explore how much flexible Ethernet (FlexE) and elastic optical network (EON) can mutually benefit each other, given their flexibilities in managing Ethernet channels and optical spectra. Specifically, we consider three FlexE architectures, i.e., FlexE-unaware, FlexE-aware and FlexE-terminal, explain how to integrate them with EON, and formulate an mixed integer linear programming mode (MILP) to optimize the corresponding network design of each integration. The exact solutions provided by the MILP models confirm that FlexE and EON can mutually benefit each other when the FlexE-aware and FlexE-terminal architectures are considered, and the more flexible the FlexE architecture is, the more benefits the integration can get. Meanwhile, the solutions also show that fixed-grid wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) networks cannot fully explore the advantages of the FlexE architectures due to the rigid transmission scheme. Hence, our results suggest that integrating FlexE and EON would be necessary in the future.