An energy-efficient impairment-aware routing algorithm for optical transport networks

Abstract

Flexible Translucent optical Transport networks have the capability to provision multiple data rate demands much more efficiently than the traditional wavelength routed optical backbone networks. By design, in order to suffice the signal reach constraint, traditional optical networks also include several repeaters that are located sparsely along each signal path so as to facilitate successful end-to end transmission of those lightpath connection signals that otherwise would exceed the optical reach. The presence of physical impairments coupled with the inclusion of repeaters that facilitate signal amplification, timing and refreshing means more overall operational power requirements. Thus, energy efficient operation of flexible Translucent Optical Transport Networks is quite crucial. Thus, in this paper we propose a combined physical impairments-aware as well as energy-efficient available network resources allocation algorithm that bases on path availability, considering the impact of energy consumption minimization versus quality of transmission (QoT). We consider the impact of physical impairments in the formulation of the algorithm. We carry out simulation validations of the proposed algorithm which generally indicate to an improvement of energy efficiency as well as other key network resources utilization.