Design and evaluate by means of simulations of mechanisms to improve the use of the spectrum available in elastic optical networks.

Nowadays, the exponential growth of traffic has created a dramatic increase in bandwidth demand. Optical networks have arisen as the solution to this problem. However, the management of these networks is still something under investigation and improvement. The main goal of this thesis is to demonstrate that the performance of an Elastic Optical Network (EON) in terms of Blocking Probability (BP) can be improved using diverse techniques such as defragmentation, buffering and a combination of both. A Matlab simulator has been designed in order to evaluate the various case scenarios that have been devised to assess the performance of the network. Some interesting conclusions have been drawn from the results such as the fact that even though applying both techniques may seem as the best approach, if we look at it from the optimal point of view, the slight improvement that it provides when comparing it to defragmentation alone is not enough to give support to the idea of using both techniques.