Enhancing protection performance by effectively using spectral slots of impairment-aware elastic optical networks [invited]

The challenge of using spectral bandwidth effectively considering optical impairments in elastic optical networks is studied. The protection performance is enhanced by improving the spectral efficiencies of the networks. Novel optical filter configuration, signal equalization, and spectral bandwidth assignment technologies are proposed to minimize the use of the guardband while taking the passband narrowing effect into consideration. It is verified that spectral slots are effectively used with actual network topology models.