Multi-band elastic optical network (MB-EON) is a promising technology to extend the bandwidth of the current elastic optical networks in the middle term. The migration from current networks to MB-EONs should be made carefully taking into account both the required cost and the bandwidth requirements. This paper focuses on the necessity of looking for a trade-off between the links to be upgraded during the migration from the standard C-band to the L-band and the acceptable level of capacity increase. Therefore, it makes two contributions to efficiently upgrade current elastic optical networks: firstly, a planning method to decide which fibers should be upgraded to exploit C+L band; and second, one heuristic for solving the routing, band, modulation level, and spectrum assignment (RBMLSA) problem during network operation. Simulation results demonstrate that, thanks to use of these proposals, the upgrade of a set of the fibers could be viewed as a fully convincing middle term solution by the network operators to get around the huge cost of the whole network migration to C+L line system.
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