Experimental study and assessment of the link distance impact in an OSNR-based IRWA algorithm in GMPLS-enabled translucent WSON networks

This article studies the impact of the fiber link distance when dynamically provisioning connections within a GMPLS-enabled translucent WSON. In particular, two link-cost strategies, namely, uniform and distance-based are compared extending previous works focused on validating a devised OSNR-based IRWA algorithm. In the uniform strategy, the metric for all the links having available wavelengths is fixed and set to 1 regardless of their physical link distance. In the distance-based, however, the link cost is set to the fiber length expressed in km. The aim of this work is to evaluate the performance of these link cost strategies when, given a network topology, their link distances change. The connection blocking probability is compared numerically, experimentally obtained within the ADRENALINE testbed^®. For the sake of completeness, several scenarios with different number of 3R regenerators are evaluated for the considered network topology.