View article

In all-optical networks the physical layer impairments accumulate along a lightpath and also vary dynamically, and a number of impairment aware routing and wavelength assignment (IA-RWA) techniques have been proposed in order to mitigate the physical layer impairments and find lightpaths that meet a required quality of transmission (QoT) constraint predefined by the network operator. However, in order to compute lightpaths, IA-RWAs typically rely on analytical models, which cannot be guaranteed to be fully accurate, and hence acceptance of lightpaths with poor QoT or rejection of lightpaths with acceptable QoT may ensue. We present a novel IA-RWA algorithm that not only considers the impact of physical impairments on RWA decisions, but also, for the first time, accounts for inaccuracy of the QoT estimators. The performance of our algorithm is compared with algorithms selected from the recent literature …