A Study of Connection Management Approaches for an Impairment-Aware Optical Control Plane

摘要

Transparent optical networks need novel connection management approaches to take into account the presence of physical impairments in lightpath provisioning. Two main schemes are emerging from literature when considering how to introduce impairment-aware mechanisms in a distributed optical control plane like GMPLS. A well-known approach is based on extending the routing protocol to compute an optically-feasible light-path. Lately, a new approach is emerging which keeps the routing protocol unmodified while leveraging on signaling protocol extensions to find the proper lightpath for the incoming connection request. The aim of this paper is to prove that the signaling-based approach has several advantages compared to the routing-based one, in term of scalability and robustness especially when link information changes are frequent in the network. Simulation results show that a signaling-based approach is much more robust to inaccurate information about network status, therefore it is a suitable approach for considering physical impairments in dynamic optical networks.