Crosstalk-Aware Shared Backup Path Protection in Multi-Core Fiber Elastic Optical Networks

Elastic optical networks employing multi-core fibers (MCF-EON) have the potential to expand significantly the transmission capacity of optical transport. However, wide deployment of such networks depends on addressing effectively two critical challenges: inter-core crosstalk, which may cause serious signal performance degradation in an MCF link, and survivability against network failures that may cause enormous data loss. In this article, we consider the design of MCF-EONs with shared-backup path protection (SBPP), one of the most efficient techniques for protecting network traffic. Specifically, we tackle the crosstalk-aware routing, core, and spectrum assignment (CA-RCSA) problem with the objective of jointly minimizing the network spectrum resources used and the total inter-core crosstalk. We formulate the problem as an integer linear programming (ILP) model subject to strict inter-core crosstalk limits for each provisioned lightpath, and we also propose an auxiliary graph (AG) based heuristic algorithm for lightpath provisioning. Simulation studies show that our algorithm is effective in terms of the objectives, and it is efficient to perform close to the ILP model in small networks, for which solving the ILP is feasible.