Performance evaluation of virtual concatenation (VCAT) enabled optical circuits provisioning in multi-domain layer 1 VPN

Layer 1 Virtual Private Networks (L1VPN) is a type of VPN that utilizes optical networks to implement VPN technologies and has the potential to deliver optical services at reduced cost. Network providers and content providers will be able to deploy applications that contain materials such as high definition video, audio, and high quality graphics for which high bandwidth is required directly into the layer 1 network. Next generation SONET utilizes virtual concatenation (VCAT) to split a circuit into multiple smaller circuits and is expected to improve network utilization. However, there is a time delay limit that VCAT requires for it to split and combine the circuits without jeopardizing the content of the stream. We associate this time limit as the quality of service (QoS) the L1VPN network needs to meet in implementing VCAT in multi-domain environment. In this paper, QoS implementation is taken into consideration in order to achieve optimal network utilization when network performance is measured. The results show that VCAT implementation in multidomain environment with QoS consideration improve the network performance.