A pragmatic approach to impairment awareness in optical networks

The points-of-presence of optical networks are interconnected by photonic paths capable of carrying Terabits of data. However, signals along those photonic paths accumulate transmission impairments and thus can be unreadable at the receiver if the accumulated impairments are too high. Our contributions in this paper are three-fold: (1) we propose the use of a realistic link structure to quantify the potential harm of impairments, (2) we propose a new additive routing metric, referred to as the Figure-of-Impact (FoI), that quantifies the potential harm of the non-linear Self-Phase Modulation (SPM) impairment, and (3) we propose a two-phase heuristic for solving the multi-constrained impairment-aware routing and wavelength assignment problem and apply it to a realistic network.