Dynamic Lightpath Establishment Considering Four-Wave Mixing for Achieving Low Power All-optical Networks

Abstract

This paper proposes a dynamic lightpath establishment scheme considering power consumption and four-wave mixing (FWM) in all-optical networks. In all-optical networks, an optical amplifier is used to amplify a group of optical signals of different wavelengths in a fiber without O/E/O conversion. Even if only one optical signal passes through an optical amplifier in a fiber, the optical amplifier operates. Thus, to efficiently use power of the optical amplifier, multiple optical signals in the fiber should be simultaneously amplified. FWM is one of the most important physical impairments to be resolved in all-optical networks because FWM decays the performance of all-optical networks. The FWM power in a fiber increases with the number of wavelengths used in the fiber. Therefore, in order to reduce the FWM power, it is preferred that optical signals are transmitted on different fibers. The proposed scheme provides an ingenious route, wavelength, fiber selection strategy considering the tradeoff between the power consumption and the FWM power. Furthermore, the proposed scheme avoids blocking of lightpath establishment due to depletion of wavelength resources. Through simulation experiments, we show that the proposed scheme efficiently reduces the blocking probability, the power consumption, and the FWM power in case of the number of fibers is fixed.