Connection Provisioning in Spectrally-Spatially Flexible Optical Networks with Physical Layer Considerations

This paper presents efficient connection provisioning techniques for spectrally-spatially flexible optical networks (SS-FON) utilizing multicore fibers (MCFs) when physical layer effects are taken into consideration. To account for the physical layer effects, two approaches are presented that are used to establish a given set of demands. One approach is to provision the requests that have acceptable quality-of-transmission (QoT) assuming a fully-loaded network for specific modulation formats, so that in the future these connections will remain feasible when subsequently new connections are established. This approach restricts the candidate path space to ensure that an established connection has acceptable QoT irrespective of the network state. The second approach is to take into account the current state of the network during the provisioning of each connection request. In the latter approach, the algorithm has to also ascertain if the establishment of a new connection will negatively impact some of the already established connections. Network resource utilization and connection blocking metrics are considered during the design of the provisioning techniques while also accounting for the PLIs.