On the effect of regenerator placement on spectrum usage in translucent Elastic Optical Networks

Translucent optical networks are considered as a promising solution for reducing the electronic processing overhead of opaque optical networks thanks to a cost-effective use of regenerator resources. In a translucent Elastic Optical Network (EON), in which each transparent segment of an optical path may have different spectrum requirements, the use of regenerators will have an impact on the spectrum occupancy in the network. In this work, we focus on the spectrum allocation and regenerator placement problem and we show that the use of regenerators reduces considerably the utilization of spectrum resources in a translucent EON.