Quantifying the benefit of BER-based differentiated path provisioning in WDM optical networks

In this paper we propose the use of bit error rate (BER) as a differentiation of service parameter for connection provisioning in optical wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networks. This is achieved through the use of impairment constraint based routing (ICBR), whereby various BER thresholds are set for accepting/blocking requests at the connection provisioning phase, depending on QoS requirements. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated through simulations, using dynamic traffic demands as an input at 10 Gb/s bit rate. The evaluation results reveal significant improvement in term of connection blocking, as compared to non-differentiated conventional RWA and ICBR algorithms.