SUMMARYFlexgrid optical networking is an attractive solution for efficiently matching allocated bandwidth with link demand but suffers from inevitable spectrum fragmentation. Spectrum fragmentation impairs network performance and results in high blocking rate and low spectrum utilization efficiency. Therefore, an optimization mechanism handling spectrum fragmentation is of vital importance in flexgrid optical networks. In this paper, we propose a genetic algorithm for solving the spectrum fragmentation problem with the objective of compacting occupation of the spectrum in flexgrid optical networks. A string of lightpaths are coded as the chromosome. The spectrum fusion degree and fragment fusion degree are introduced as the fitness functions to conduct the evolution in genetic algorithm, which can also be used to assess the degree of spectrum fragmentation in the network. As a result, the genetic algorithm provides a lightpath reconfiguration map, which identifies the candidate lightpaths to be reallocated, their reconfiguration sequence, and new locations. The proposed algorithm is compared with commonly used approaches under different network conditions. Simulation results demonstrate the ability of the proposed algorithm to efficiently solve the problem of spectrum defragmentation in flexgrid optical networks. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.