Minimizing Traffic Disruptions in 6G-Ready Optical Transport Networks

As traffic keeps increasing, the impact of connection disruption in case of link failures becomes critical for operators. In order to reduce any connection disruption, there is a need for a spectrum efficient and traffic agnostic recovery scheme. In this paper, we present and evaluate the performance of a link restoration mechanism for flexible optical networks in a multi-period scenario. The proposed method uses spectrum redistribution and an MILP based path restoration method to recover disrupted traffic, along with regeneration capabilities. The paper also investigates spectrum reservation to aid the restoration with increasing traffic. The performance of the restoration mechanism is evaluated with 3 metrics and compared with a dedicated protection scheme over a Nobel-Germany network. The results show the proposed scheme is able to restore upto 80% of the disrupted traffic in the worst case scenario, with spectrum reservation and exhaustive path selection providing further improvement in terms of restoration.