An Effective Strategy for Link Upgrade from C to C+L Band in Elastic Optical Backbone Networks

Multi-band transmission is a promising solution for capacity enhancement in optical networks. We propose a novel strategy, named C to C+L Upgrade (CLU), to gradually upgrade links from C to C+L bands. We develop a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN)-based model to efficiently predict links for upgrade, based on network state and resource utilization, to reduce blocking and upgrade cost. Our results show that CLU outperforms baseline strategies (which do not employ predictive decisions) by upgrading fewer links at appropriate times.