Dynamic RWA with FWM-induced crosstalk awareness and modulation format conversion in wavelength-routed optical networks

The constraint of signal transmission quality and network resources utilization in transparent optical networks are herein addressed through a representative cost function based upon an impairment-constraint-base routing (ICBR) approach, taking into account link capacity utilization and the nonlinear physical effect, in the primary instance due to Four-Wave Mixing (FWM)-induced crosstalk. The FWM effect is considered one of the most severe physical impairments for the future photonic networks since the accumulation of FWM crosstalk may cause a fatal degradation in the teletraffic network performance. This paper presents an added functionality to the network model design based on all-optical modulation format conversion from conventional on-off keying (OOK) to quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) sending more data within the same bandwidth while minimizing the blocking probability. The joint effect of physical impairment (i.e., FWM-induced crosstalk) awareness and two different modulation formats is considered through numerical simulations. The proposed scheme is expected to realize an all-optical transparent interconnection between networks that employ diverse modulation formats. Results show that the proposed FWM-aware Routing and Wavelength Assignment (RWA) algorithm leads to a more realistic system performance while giving a significant improvement on the network performance.