Probe Schemes for Quality-of-Transmission-Aware Wavelength Provisioning

Future all-optical networks will have to fulfill at least the same stringent service quality requirements as legacy optical networks. This is particularly challenging in the context of transparency in the optical transport layer because of the physical-layer (impairment) awareness it requires. In this paper we introduce the concept of verifying the quality of transmission (QoT) for wavelength connectivity services using probe traffic as a way to achieve cost-effective impairment-aware routing and wavelength assignment (IA-RWA). Results demonstrate that probe-based IA-RWA is a promising approach for guaranteeing service quality in future connection-oriented, all-optical networks without resorting to complex QoT models.