Service Velocity: Rapid Provisioning Strategies in Optical ROADM Networks

The advent of reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers with colorless and non-directional add/drop ports enables transponders and regenerators to be pre-deployed, without a priori knowledge of which wavelength or direction they will eventually serve. We study pre-deployment of optical regenerators as a means to drastically reduce the provisioning time, using Monte Carlo simulation of an optical backbone network. With appropriate placement strategies, regenerators can be efficiently pre-deployed so that new connections can be established rapidly, without the delays caused by service visits to intermediate network nodes.