  The emergence of new network applications is driving network operators to not
only fulfill dynamic bandwidth requirements, but offer various grades of
service. Degraded provisioning provides an effective solution to flexibly
allocate resources in various dimensions to reduce blocking for differentiated
demands when network congestion occurs. In this work, we investigate the novel
problem of online degraded provisioning in service-differentiated multi-layer
networks with optical elasticity. Quality of Service (QoS) is assured by
service-holding-time prolongation and immediate access as soon as the service
arrives without set-up delay. We decompose the problem into degraded routing
and degraded resource allocation stages, and design polynomial-time algorithms
with the enhanced multi-layer architecture to increase the network flexibility
in temporal and spectral dimensions. Illustrative results verify that we can
achieve significant reduction of network service failures, especially for
requests with higher priorities. The results also indicate that degradation in
optical layer can increase the network capacity, while the degradation in
electric layer provides flexible time-bandwidth exchange.
