A Span Power Management Scheme for Rapid Lightpath Provisioning and Releasing in Multi-Core Fiber Networks

The lightpath provisioning time or releasing time is adversely affected by the time that optical amplifiers require to adjust to a newly added or terminated signal power. This shortcoming is particularly true with multi-core erbium-doped amplifiers (EDFAs), as multi-core transient-suppressed EDFAs are unavailable at the current time. This paper proposes a fiber span power management scheme based on dummy wavelength signals that are used to shorten the lightpath provisioning and releasing times in multi-core fiber networks. With the shorter time of lightpath provisioning and releasing procedures, the total time that is required to reserve wavelengths in the system is decreased, which means that network resources are used more efficiently. As a result, the blocking performance and average waiting time in the system are improved. To evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme, this paper introduces both analytical model and simulation study. In the introduced model, the ratio of the number of activating and activated dummy wavelengths to the number of dummy wavelengths in each span is considered in the range between 0 and 1. The analysis reveals that the performance of the proposed scheme depends on \alpha , which is the ratio of the number of dummy wavelengths to the number of dummy and lightpath wavelengths in each span, and there exists a point of \alpha where the blocking probability becomes minimum. We further observe that the proposed scheme outperforms the conventional approaches in terms of blocking probability and average waiting time, as traffic loads increase. Finally, we provide the direction on how our introduced model can be considered for a network with multi-span routes.