The Routing and Spectrum Allocation Problem: A Combinatorial Optimization Survey

Marcelo Bianchetti () and Javier Marenco ()
Additional contact information
Marcelo Bianchetti: Universidad de Buenos Aires
Javier Marenco: Universidad Torcuato Di Tella

SN Operations Research Forum, 2025, vol. 6, issue 3, 1-45

Abstract: Abstract One of the most promising solutions to deal with huge data traffic demands in large communication networks is given by flexible optical networking, in particular the flexible-grid technology specified in the ITU-T standard G.694.1. In this specification, the frequency spectrum of an optical fiber link is divided into narrow frequency slots. Any sequence of consecutive slots can be used as a simple channel, and such a channel can be switched in the network nodes to create a so-called lightpath. In this kind of networks, the problem of establishing lightpaths for a set of end-to-end demands that compete for spectrum resources is called the routing and spectrum allocation problem (RSA). This problem is NP-hard and has attracted the interest of the combinatorial optimization community in recent years, giving rise to many approaches from this field in order to both understand the theoretical properties of RSA and to solve this problem in practice. In this survey, we review the existing literature on RSA and its main variants from a combinatorial optimization perspective, with particular emphasis on the applied techniques and the different formulations of the problem that have been studied.

Keywords: Survey; Routing and spectrum allocation; Networking; Optical fiber (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s43069-025-00498-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:snopef:v:6:y:2025:i:3:d:10.1007_s43069-025-00498-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer.com/journal/43069

DOI: 10.1007/s43069-025-00498-x

Access Statistics for this article

SN Operations Research Forum is currently edited by Marco Lübbecke

More articles in SN Operations Research Forum from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().