Transceiver Sharing in Survivable Spectrally-Spatially Flexible Optical Networks

In this paper, we analyze the problem of transceiver sharing in survivable spectrally-spatially flexible optical networks (SS-FONs) that realize transmission of spectral super-channels and where flexible signal regeneration is provided by transceivers operating in back-to-back (B2B) configurations. Namely, to improve network throughput, we propose to use a backup transceiver sharing approach for protection of lightpaths provisioned in the network. To address the considered problem, we develop an Adaptive Survivable Routing with Back-to-Back Regeneration with Transceiver Sharing (ASRBR-TS) algorithm that serves dynamic routing requests protected by backup paths. The ASRBR-TS algorithm accounts for limited spectrum and transceiver resources and makes use of the flexibility of the B2B regeneration. With the use of ASRBR-TS, we examine potential performance gains of transceiver sharing in terms of bandwidth blocking probability (BBP) and the traffic load that can be provisioned in the network with 1% BBP threshold. The numerical experiments are run for two representative network topologies with realistic assumptions concerning applied physical model. In the experiments, we also analyze a squeezed protection approach, in which the backup path supports only a part of the bit-rate realized on the working path. The results show that the transceiver sharing approach can significantly improve the network performance, i.e., it allows to provision up to 49% more traffic when compared with a dedicated transceiver approach.