A virtualized optical network (VON) is proposed as a key to implementing increased agility and flexibility into the future Internet and applications by providing any-to-any connectivity with the appropriate optical bandwidth at the appropriate time. The VON is enabled by introducing optical transparentization and optical fine granular grooming based on optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing.

We describe a concept and realization of distance-adaptive (DA) resource allocation in spectrum-sliced elastic optical path network (SLICE). We modify the modulation format and cross-connection bandwidth of individual fixed-bit rate optical paths to optimize performance with respect to transmission distance. The shorter paths are allocated a smaller amount of resources which allows reducing the spectrum occupied by the channel. We show in calculation a reduction in required spectral resources of more than 60% when compared to the traditional traffic allocation schemes based on ITU-T grid. The concept is verified experimentally.