Signal-quality consideration for dynamic connection provisioning in all-optical wavelength-routed networks

We investigate new connection-provisioning algorithms to efficiently provide signal-quality-guaranteed connections in an all-optical WDM mesh network. In the all-optical network, signal degradations incurred by non-ideal transmission medium accumulate along a lightpath. When the signal degradation reaches a certain level, the connection is not usable and is blocked due to transmission impairments in the physical layer. To ensure high service quality of provisioned connections, it is essential to develop intelligent routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) algorithms which can combat the effects of impairments when setting up a connection. For this purpose, we propose two impairment-aware RWA algorithms, namely impairment-aware best-path (IABP) algorithm and impairment-aware first-fit (IAFF) algorithm. The optical signal-to-noise raito (OSNR) requirement and polarization mode dispersion (PMD) effect are used as signal-quality constraints to avoid setting up a connection with unacceptable quality due to the effects of transmission impairments. With the signal-quality consideration, as compared to algorithms that are not impairment aware in a realistic optical network, our proposed impairment-aware algorithms efficiently provide signal-quality-guaranteed connection while significantly reducing connection-blocking probability, better utilizing network resources, and having a reasonable computational requirement. Also, the effect of channel bit rate is studied in this paper.