Noise-Aware Wavelength Assignment for Wavelength Switched Optical Networks

In transparent WSON (wavelength switched optical networks), signals are switched optically and propagate thousands of kilometers without electrical regeneration. Over such distances, physical impairments, such as crosstalk, ASE noise and so on, can accumulate along the path and lead to signal quality degradation. If the admission of a lightpath will either cause its BER to be too high, or sufficiently degrade the performance of the already established lightpaths, it must be blocked. Most of recent research only consider the first case, but ignore the second case, which will lead to service interruption. In this paper, a new noise-aware wavelength assignment scheme called NAWA has been proposed, which use IIES (Impairments impact Evaluation Scheme) to solve both problems mentioned above in a distributed way. Simulations have been conducted and numerical results show that: Compared with normal impairment-aware solutions, NAWA can eliminate the occurrence of service interruption, and achieve better performance in total blocking.