Minimizing Cost of Hierarchical OTN Traffic Grooming Boards in Mesh Networks

The continuous traffic growth experienced in telecom networks pushes network operators to constantly investigate new solutions to deploy scalable and cost-effective network architectures, especially in the metro segment. These solutions should also ensure backward compatibility with existing network architectures. A cost-effective technical solution for today's metro networks consists in optimizing the deployment cost of hierarchical traffic-grooming boards while considering a mix of coherent (typically 100 Gbps) and non-coherent (typically 10 Gbps) transmission technologies. In this study, we consider metro regional networks composed of interconnected filterless rings, and we investigate how to minimize the joint cost of stacked Optical Transport Network (OTN) traffic-grooming boards, coherent and non-coherent transponders and interfaces, and Dispersion Compensation Modules (DCM). We propose a novel optimization approach based on Genetic Algorithms to effectively solve the associated grooming problem and compare its performance to baseline strategies, showing that we can reach up to 79% cost savings in terms of the total cost of deployed equipment.