Impairment aware sharing constraint relaxed path protection in translucent optical networks

As optical networks are evolving from traditional opaque networks toward future transparent networks, physical impairments from transmission and switching have become the significant transparent reach limitation for signals. To overcome physical impairments, sparsely deploying optical-electrical-optical regenerators in transparent networks is currently the most economic and reliable solution, namely translucent networks. We study the impairment aware protection issues and propose an impairment aware sharing constraint relaxed path protection (ISRPP) scheme for single-link failures in translucent optical networks. By relaxing the traditional sharing constraint in a limited degree, ISRPP effectively enhances the resource utilization on both wavelengths and regenerators, which contributes to improve the performance of connection blocking probability. Simulation results show that ISRPP can obtain notable resource efficiency and achieve satisfactory tradeoff between blocking probability and vulnerability ratio with respect to its counterpart.