A Novel Impairment Aware RWA Algorithm With Consideration of QoT Estimation Inaccuracy

In all-optical networks the physical layer impairments accumulate along a lightpath and also vary dynamically, and a number of impairment aware routing and wavelength assignment (IA-RWA) techniques have been proposed in order to mitigate the physical layer impairments and find lightpaths that meet a required quality of transmission (QoT) constraint predefined by the network operator. However, in order to compute lightpaths, IA-RWAs typically rely on analytical models, which cannot be guaranteed to be fully accurate, and hence acceptance of lightpaths with poor QoT or rejection of lightpaths with acceptable QoT may ensue. We present a novel IA-RWA algorithm that not only considers the impact of physical impairments on RWA decisions, but also, for the first time, accounts for inaccuracy of the QoT estimators. The performance of our algorithm is compared with algorithms selected from the recent literature. All algorithms are evaluated through simulations in a realistic scenario. Our proposed novel algorithm outperforms the selected algorithms in terms of blocking rate and also the amount of required resources for achieving a very low (i.e., 5×10−6) blocking rate under similar assumptions. In addition we show that accounting for QoT estimation inaccuracy changes the performance of the proposed IA-RWA substantially, and hence that the QoT estimator inaccuracy is an important design parameter in transparent optical networking.