Physical-layer impairment estimation for random bandwidth traffic

Abstract

Traffic demands in future elastic optical networks are expected to be heterogeneous with time-varying bandwidth. Estimating the physical-layer impairments (PLIs) for random bandwidth demands is important for cross-layer network resource provisioning. State-of-the-art PLI estimation techniques yield conservative PLI estimates using the maximum bandwidth, which leads to significant over-provisioning. This paper uses probabilistic information on random bandwidth demands to provide a computationally efficient, accurate, and flexible PLI estimate. The proposed model is consistent with the needs of future self-configuring fiber-optic networks and maximally avoids up to a 25% overestimation of PLIs compared to the benchmark for the cases studied, thus reducing the network design margin at a negligible extra computational cost.