Network consolidation - how to improve the efficiency of provisioning oriented optical networks

Fast provisioning capabilities enabled by signalling intelligence and automated switching flexibility are becoming fundamental features of next generation networks based on optical transport. Throughout the recent years numerous research and development projects, standardisation activities, and a large number of publications have been devoted to fast provisioning enabled optical networks. However, in the related research activities less attention has been paid to network state evolution during provisioning. The main scope of the paper is to propose a consolidation based lifecycle for network design and development of provisioning oriented optical networks in order to improve the performance of networks of this type. The proposal is motivated by the identified inherent lack of capacity efficiency of optical channel provisioning processes.