Robust regenerator allocation in nonlinear flexible-grid optical networks with time-varying data rates

Predeployment of regenerators in a selected subset of network nodes allows service providers to achieve rapid provisioning of traffic demands, high utilization, and reduced network operational costs, while still guaranteeing lightpath quality of transmission. Enabled by bandwidth-variable transceivers in flexible-grid optical networks, optical channel bandwidths are no longer fixed but constantly changing according to real-time communication requirements. Consequently, the data-rate-variable traffic together with other new network features introduced by flexible-grid networks will render the regenerator allocation very difficult due to the complicated network states. In this paper, we investigate how to allocate regenerators robustly in flexible-grid optical networks to combat physical-layer impairments when the data rates of traffic demands are random variables. The Gaussian noise model and a modified statistical network assessment process framework are used to characterize the probabilistic distributions of physical-layer impairments for each demand, based on which a heuristic algorithm is proposed to select a set of regenerator sites with minimum blocking probabilities. Our method achieves the same blocking probabilities with on average 10% less regenerator sites compared with the greedy constrained-routing regenerator allocation method, and obtains blocking probabilities two orders of magnitude lower than that of the routing and reach method with the same number of regenerator sites.