Joint Assignment of Power, Routing, and Spectrum in Static Flexible-Grid Networks

This paper proposes a novel network planning strategy to jointly allocate physical layer resources together with the routing and spectrum assignment in transparent nonlinear flexible-grid optical networks with static traffic demands. The physical layer resources, such as power spectral density, modulation format, and carrier frequency, are optimized for each connection. By linearizing the Gaussian noise model, both an optimal formulation and a low complexity decomposition heuristic are proposed. Our methods minimize the spectrum usage of networks, while satisfying requirements on the throughput and quality of transmission. Compared with existing schemes that allocate a uniform power spectral density to all connections, our proposed methods relax this constraint and, thus, utilize network resources more efficiently. Numerical results show that by optimizing the power spectral density per connection, the spectrum usage can be reduced by around 20% over uniform power spectral density schemes.