View article

Transparent optical mesh networks are an appealing solution to provide cost-effective high bandwidth connections eliminating the need of expensive intermediate electronic regenerators. However, the implementation of transparent optical networks requires to take into account physical impairment information for effective lightpath set-up. In this paper, we present two distributed solutions to encompass physical impairments based on enhancements of the GMPLS protocol suite. Specifically, both GMPLS routing protocol and signaling protocol extensions are presented and discussed. An alternative centralized approach based on an impairment-aware Path Computation Element (PCE) is also proposed.

The distributed routing approach exhibits convergence limitations, while the distributed signaling approach is scalable and effective. The latter is then compared against the centralized PCE approach …