Challenges and Requirements for Introducing Impairment-awareness into the Management and Control Planes of ASON/GMPLS WDM Networks

The absence of electrical regenerators in transparent WDM networks significantly contributes to reduce the overall network cost. In transparent WDM networks, a proper resource allocation requires that the presence of physical impairments in Routing and Wavelength Assignment (RWA) and lightpath provisioning be taken into account. In this article a centralized, a hybrid centralized-distributed and two distributed approaches that integrate information about most relevant physical impairments in RWA and lightpath provisioning are presented and assessed. Both centralized and hybrid approaches perform a centralized path computation at the management-plane level, utilizing physical impairment information, while the lightpath provisioning is done by the management plane or the control plane, respectively. The distributed approaches fall entirely within the scope of the ASON/GMPLS control plane. For these two approaches, we provide functional requirements, architectural functional blocks, and protocol extensions for implementing either an impairment-aware real-time RWA, or a lighpath provisioning based on impairment-aware signaling.