Dynamic Lightpath Establishment Considering Four‐Wave Mixing for Achieving Low‐Power All‐Optical Networks

Abstract

SUMMARY This paper proposes a method for dynamically establishing a lightpath that takes into consideration power consumption and four‐wave mixing (FWM) in an all‐optical network. In an all‐optical network, an optical fiber amplifier is used to amplify a group of optical signals of different wavelengths in a fiber without O/E/O conversion. Even if only one optical signal passes through an optical fiber amplifier in a fiber, the optical fiber amplifier operates. Thus, to efficiently use the power of an optical fiber amplifier, multiple optical signals in the fiber should be simultaneously amplified. FWM is one of the most important physical impediments to be resolved an in all‐optical network because FWM degrades the performance of such networks. The FWM power in a fiber increases with the number of wavelengths used in the fiber. Therefore, in order to reduce the FWM power, it is preferable to have optical signals be transmitted on different fibers. The proposed method provides an ingenious path, wavelength, and fiber selection strategy that takes the trade‐off between power consumption and FWM power into account. Furthermore, the proposed method avoids blocking of lightpath establishment due to depletion of wavelength resources. Through simulation experiments, we show that the proposed method can efficiently reduce the blocking probability, power consumption, and FWM power when the number of fibers is fixed.