Span power management scheme for rapid lightpath provisioning in multi-core fibre networks

The activation time when creating lightpaths is adversely affected by the time optical amplifiers require to adjust the newly added signal power. This shortcoming is particularly true with multi-core erbium-doped amplifiers. A fibre span power management scheme is proposed based on the use of dummy wavelength signals, whose function is to alleviate this shortcoming and shorten the required lightpath activation time. An analytical model is developed to estimate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in achieving this goal.