Constraint routing and regenerator site concentration in ROADM networks

Advances in the development of colorless and nondirectional reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexers (ROADMs) enable flexible predeployment of optoelectronic regenerators (reshaping, retiming, and reamplifying known as 3R) in future optical networks. Compared to the current practice of installing a regenerator only when a circuit needs them, predeployment of regenerators in specific sites will allow service providers to achieve rapid provisioning such as bandwidth-on-demand service and fast restoration. Concentrating the predeployment of regenerators in a subset of ROADM sites will achieve high utilization and reduces the network operational costs. We prove the resulting optimization problem is NP-hard and provide the proof. We present an efficient heuristic for this problem that takes into account both the cost of individual circuits (regenerator cost and transmission line system cost) and the number of regenerator sites. We validate our heuristic approach with integer linear programming (ILP) formulations for a small network. Using specific network examples, we show that our heuristic has near-optimal performance under most studied scenarios and cost models. We further enhance the heuristic to incorporate the probability of demand for each circuit. This enables a reduction in the number of regenerator sites by allowing circuits to use costlier paths if they have lower probability of being needed. We also evaluate the heuristic to determine the extra regenerator sites required to support diverse routing. In this paper, we provide detailed analysis, pseudocodes, and proofs for the models presented in our previous work [Nat. Fiber Optic Engineers Conf., 2012, NW3F.6; 9th Int. Conf. on Design of Reliable Communication Networks (DRCN), 2013, 139] and compare the heuristic results with ILP for a small-scale network topology.