Static and Dynamic Routing, Fiber, Modulation Format, and Spectrum Allocation in Hybrid ULL Fiber-SSMF Elastic Optical Networks

TL;DR

This paper addresses the complex routing, fiber, modulation, and spectrum allocation problem in hybrid ultra-low loss fiber and standard fiber elastic optical networks, proposing MILP and heuristic algorithms to optimize performance under static and dynamic traffic.

Contribution

It introduces a novel RFMSA problem formulation for hybrid fiber networks and develops spectrum window plane heuristics with various fiber selection strategies, including OSNR-aware and fiber-first approaches.

Findings

OSNR-aware strategy achieves near-optimal performance in static traffic.

Spectrum usage-based strategy reduces blocking probability in dynamic traffic.

Heuristic algorithms outperform baseline methods in simulation tests.

Abstract

Traditional standard single-mode fibers (SSMF) are unable to satisfy the future long-distance and high-speed optical channel transmission requirement due to their relatively large signal losses. To address this issue, the ultra-low loss and large effective area (ULL) fibers are successfully manufactured and expected to deployed in the existing optical networks. For such ULL fiber deployment, network operators prefer adding ULL fibers to each link rather than replace existing SSMFs, resulting in a scenario where both of SSMF and ULL fiber coexist on the same link. In this paper, we investigated the routing, fiber, modulation format, and spectrum allocation (RFMSA) problem in the context of an elastic optical network (EON) where ULL fiber and SSMF coexisting on each link under both the static and dynamic traffic demands. We formulated this RFMSA problem as a node-arc based Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model and developed Spectrum Window Plane (SWP)-based heuristic algorithms based on different fiber selection strategies, including spectrum usage based (SU), optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) aware, ULL fiber first (UFF), and random strategies. Simulation results show that in the static traffic demand situation, the RFMSA algorithm based on the OSNR-aware (OA) strategy exhibits optimal performance, attaining a performance similar to that of the MILP model regarding the maximum number of frequency slots (FSs) used in the entire network. Moreover, in the dynamic traffic demand scenario, the SU strategy remarkably surpasses the other strategies in terms of the lightpath blocking probability.