Impairment Aware Routing in Translucent Optical Networks

Optical networks are ideally suited to meet today\u27s rapidly increasing bandwidth demands due to the large fiber bandwidth capacity, low attenuation, low distortion and low cost. When an optical signal propagates along the fiber links, its quality degrades due to physical layer impairments such as optical noise, chromatic dispersion, polarization mode dispersion and nonlinear effects. As a result, bit error rate (BER) may become so high that signal may not be properly detected at the receiver. In order to address this problem, we have developed an impairment aware dynamic routing and wavelength assignment (IA-RWA) algorithm. Our algorithm not only takes into account the physical layer impairments but also resolves any wavelength conflict if there is a cycle in the path from a source to a destination. Our results indicate that the proposed algorithm significantly reduce the blocking probability in dynamic lightpath allocation if the impact of physical layer impairments is compensated by the use of regenerators