Provisioning, Recovery, and In-Operation Planning in Elastic Optical Networks

4 Architectures for Provisioning and In‐operation Planning

Luis Velasco and Marc Ruiz

Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

Current transport networks are statically configured with big static fat pipes based on capacity overprovisioning. The rationality behind that is guaranteeing traffic demand and Quality of Service. As a result, long planning cycles are used to upgrade the network and prepare it for the next planning period (see the network life cycle in Chapter 2). Aiming at guaranteeing that the network can support the forecast traffic and deal with failure scenarios, spare capacity is usually installed, thus increasing network expenditures. Moreover, results from network capacity planning are manually deployed in the network, which limits the network agility. In this chapter, we review control and management architectures to allow the network to be dynamically operated. Employing those dynamic capabilities, the network can be reconfigured and reoptimized in response to traffic changes in an automatic fashion. Hence, resource overprovisioning can be minimized and overall network costs reduced.

Because of the large capacity of optical connections, optical networks are commonly used to support virtual topologies on which client demands are served. Therefore, each optical connection is shared by a number of client connections, which balances the changes in the traffic that they have to support over time (e.g., during day and night hours). However, the ...