Novel signalling based approach for handling linear and non-linear impairments in transparent optical networks

In GMPLS-based transparent optical networks, the switching and routing functionalities are performed in optical domain. However in these networks, physical layer impairments (PLIs) incurred by non-ideal transmission media accumulate along an optical path, and the overall effect determines the feasibility of lightpaths. Introducing transparency in optical layer reduces the possibility of GMPLS protocols interaction with optical layer at intermediate nodes along the path. Hence there is an urgent need to develop techniques that provide PLI information to GMPLS protocols and algorithms that efficiently utilize this information to realize dynamically reconfigurable GMPLS/WDM networks. We propose an optical control plane (OCP) architecture based on extensions to RSVP-TE, which is capable of handling both linear impairments (LIs) and non-linear impairments (NLIs). We propose a method to deal with the possible disruption of existing lightpaths because of excessive crosstalk introduced due to new lightpath setup. The simulation results suggest that OCP architectures to handle NLIs are important to avoid potential lightpath disruption.