Partial filterable optical networking: A gradual upgrade scheme for large-scale backbone networks

Abstract

Widespread commercialization of 5G/F5G access networks requires the upgrade of optical backbone networks. Besides increasing transmission rate of optical communication system, increasing number of nodes is also a suitable way to upgrade optical backbone networks. Since building a large-scale network in one step is very expensive, we introduce a gradual backbone network upgrade scheme named partial filterable optical networking (PFON) in this paper. In the PFON scheme, only part of nodes are filterable nodes deployed with bandwidth-variable spectrum selective switches, so networking cost can be greatly reduced. Furthermore, we divide the planning problem of PFON into two subproblems, namely filterable node selection subproblem and spectrum assignment subproblem. For the first subproblem, a heuristic algorithm is designed; for the second subproblem, an integer non-linear programming model and a heuristic algorithm are respectively proposed for small and large networks. Performance results show that the PFON scheme can make a tradeoff between networking cost and spectrum consumption, by properly setting the number of filterable nodes.