Quality of transmission-aware control plane performance analysis for elastic optical networks

Abstract

Physical layer impairment-aware control plane techniques are studied for dynamic networking of elastic optical networks (EONs). To this end, performance of three control plane architectures, the generalized multi-protocol label switching (GMPLS), the GMPLS method with a path computation element unit, and the software-defined networking (SDN), are analyzed considering nonlinear interference (NLI) noise (consisting of self-phase and cross-phase modulation effects) and amplified spontaneous emission noise. Signal-to-noise ratio estimation of all the control plane architectures is performed by means of the well established gaussian noise model. To reduce the blocking probability caused by the NLI noise in EONs, an impairment-aware routing and spectrum assignment algorithm is proposed to ensure a required quality of transmission for requested light-paths. Moreover, transmit launch power influence on blocking probability is investigated exploiting extensive numerical simulations based on stochastic traffic modeling for the investigated control plane architectures in Pan-European and national science foundation network (NSFNET) topologies. The numerical results show nearly 50% improvement in blocking probability of the SDN control plane by applying an impairment aware scheme at traffics around 200 Erlang. Furthermore, the results indicate that the lowest blocking probability is observed at a transmit power of 0 dBm for all the control plane techniques.