Cost and Power-Consumption Analysis for Power Profile Monitoring with Multiple Monitors per Link in Optical Networks

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the cost and power consumption of Power Profile Monitoring (PPM) in optical networks, proposing an optimization model and heuristic to efficiently deploy PPM monitors, and compares it to traditional OTDR methods.

Contribution

It introduces a formal optimization framework for PPM monitor placement, proves its NP-hardness, and provides a scalable heuristic algorithm for large network topologies.

Findings

PPM cost should be less than 2.6 times OTDR for nationwide networks.

PPM cost should be less than 10.2 times OTDR for continental networks.

The proposed heuristic effectively scales to large topologies.

Abstract

As deploying large amounts of monitoring equipment results in elevated cost and power consumption, novel low-cost monitoring methods are being continuously investigated. A new technique called Power Profile Monitoring (PPM) has recently gained traction thanks to its ability to monitor an entire lightpath using a single post-processing unit at the lightpath receiver. PPM does not require to deploy an individual monitor for each span, as in the traditional monitoring technique using Optical Time-Domain Reflectometer (OTDR). In this work, we aim to quantify the cost and power consumption of PPM (using OTDR as a baseline reference), as this analysis can provide guidelines for the implementation and deployment of PPM. First, we discuss how PPM and OTDR monitors are deployed, and we formally state a new Optimized Monitoring Placement (OMP) problem for PPM. Solving the OMP problem allows to identify the minimum number of PPM monitors that guarantees that all links in the networks are monitored by at least $n$ PPM monitors (note that using $n>1$ allows for increased monitoring accuracy). We prove the NP-hardness of the OMP problem and formulate it using an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) model. Finally, we also devise a heuristic algorithm for the OMP problem to scale to larger topologies. Our numerical results, obtained on realistic topologies, suggest that the cost (and power) of one PPM module should be lower than 2.6 times that of one OTDR for nation-wide and 10.2 times for continental-wide topology.