QoT-aware Grooming, Routing, and Wavelength Assignment (GRWA) for Mixed-Line-Rate translucent optical networks

A Mixed Line Rate (MLR) optical network is a good candidate for a core backbone network because of its ability to provide diverse line rates to effectively accommodate traffic demands with heterogeneous bandwidth requirements. Because of the deleterious effects of physical impairments, there is a maximum transmission reach for optical signals before they have to be regenerated. Being expensive devices, regenerators are expected to be sparsely located and used in such a network, called a translucent optical network. In this paper, we consider the Grooming, Routing, and Wavelength Assignment (GRWA) problem so that the Quality of Transmission (QoT) for connections is satisfied, and the network-level performance metric of blocking probability is minimized. Cross-layer heuristics to effectively allocate the sparse regenerators in MLR networks are developed, and extensive simulation results are presented to demonstrate their effectiveness.