Impairment aware routing with service differentiation in heterogeneous WDM networks

In transparent Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) networks, the signal is transported from source to destination in the optical domain through all-optical channels, or lightpaths. A lightpath may traverse several fiber segments and optical components that in general degrade the optical signal. This effect introduces the need for considering physical layer impairments during the connection-provisioning phase. Physical layer impairments can be divided into linear and non-linear. Both types of impairments are highly dependent on the fiber characteristics, which in turn are sensitive to length, temperature and age. A close look at the fiber infrastructure of today's network operators reveals a situation where old and newly deployed fibers coexist in the network. This heterogeneous fiber plant presents a challenge. A tradeoff should be found between the QoS requirements of connection requests and the use of the available (old and new) network resources. This calls for a provisioning mechanism able to adapt to the various fiber composition scenarios. In parallel, given the need for service differentiation, the authors recently proposed an Impairment Constraint Based Routing (ICBR) algorithm, referred to as ICBR-Diff, supporting differentiation of services at the BER (Bit Error Rate) level in a network with a homogeneous fiber infrastructure. In this paper the ICBR-Diff algorithm is extended to heterogeneous network; particularly, it is evaluated in WDM networks with fiber links having varying Polarization Mode Dispersion characteristics, i.e., with old and new fiber coexisting. Simulation results show that the ICBR-Diff algorithm exhibits high adaptability in a heterogeneous fiber composition scenario. This translates into improved performance in terms of blocking probability, when compared to traditional impairment aware routing algorithms.