Assessment of novel regenerator assignment strategies in dynamic translucent elastic optical networks

The problem of regenerator assignment (RA) in translucent optical networks consists in segmenting a lightpath into several transparent segments, each of which linked by 3 R regenerators. In this article, we present two heuristics and compare their effectiveness with an exhaustive method to solve the RA problem in translucent elastic optical networks under dynamic traffic. The exhaustive method is capable of finding solutions that are able to minimize, simultaneously, the number of regenerators and frequency slots used in a given route. It is assumed 3 R regenerators, which are capable to perform both modulation format and spectrum conversion. In our simulations, we consider the amplified spontaneous emission noise generated by optical amplifiers as physical impairment. Two practical mesh topologies have been analyzed in terms of call request blocking probability. The results show that the presented heuristics are able to find solutions that provide very similar performance to those found by utilizing the best solutions of the exhaustive method.