Spatial Division Security in Elastic Optical Networks: Establishing a Network-Level Baseline
Recent work has combined spectral encoding and Spatial Division Security (SDS) to protect optical signals at the physical layer; however, the network-level impact of SDS has not yet been quantified. Assuming that the physical-layer security of SDS has already been established, this study evaluates its performance in multi-service Elastic Optical Networks (EONs) through discrete-event simulations over the 14-node NSFNET and 24-node USANET topologies under normalized traffic loads. SDS partitions connection demands into spectrum slices transmitted over edge-disjoint routes and is compared with conventional single-path EON routing. While spectrum slicing delays the onset of blocking under light loads, the additional spatial resource consumption associated with detour paths increases link contention under heavy traffic. At a normalized load of 0.5, SDS exhibits higher service blocking
and lower delivered bandwidth than conventional EON, with the high-bandwidth service class c3 experiencing the greatest degradation. These results establish a network-level performance baseline for future SDS research involving dynamic slicing strategies and advanced edge-disjoint routing algorithms.