On reducing optical monitoring uncertainties and localizing soft failures

We propose a scheme to reduce monitoring uncertainties in optical networks. The proposed scheme uses monitoring data of optical connections (lightpaths) which can be obtained from coherent optical receivers that can also function as optical performance monitors (OPM). We exploit both space and time correlation of the monitoring data in order to reduce the monitoring uncertainties. The improved accuracy can result in various benefits, the most common one is that the Quality of Transmission (QoT) can be estimated with higher accuracy which can in turn lead to more optimized decisions and lower provisioning costs. In this paper we present another application, we show how to use the obtained accurate monitoring data to localize soft failures (also referred to as QoT problems) on a per link level.