Elastic Optical Networks (EONs) are a promising optical technology to deal with the ever-increasing traffic and the vast number of connected devices of the next generation of the Internet, associated to paradigms like the Internet of Things (IoT), the Tactile Internet or the Industry 4.0, to name just a few. In this kind of optical network, each optical circuit or lightpath is provisioned by means of superchannels of variable bandwidth. In this manner, only the necessary bandwidth to accommodate the demand is allocated, improving the spectrum usage. When establishing a connection, the EON control layer determines the modulation format to be used and allocates a portion of the spectrum in a sequence of fibers from the source to the destination node providing the user-demanded bandwidth. This is known as the routing, modulation level and spectrum assignment (RMSA) problem. In this work, we firstly review the most important contributions in that area, and then, we propose a novel RMSA algorithm, multi-path best-fit (MP-BF), which uses a split spectrum multi-path strategy together with a spectrum assignment technique (best-fit), and which jointly exploit the flexibility of EONs. A simulation study has been conducted comparing the performance of EONs when using MP-BF with other proposals from the literature. The results of this study show that, by using MP-BF, the network can increase its performance in terms of lightpath request blocking ratio and supported traffic load, without affecting the energy per bit or the computation time required to find a solution.
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