Influence of Physical Layer Configuration on Performance of Elastic Optical OFDM Networks

We study how the physical layer characteristics and novel digital impairment mitigation techniques impact the performance of elastic optical OFDM networks. The relationship between bandwidth blocking ratio (BBR) and fiber type, span length, dispersion management, FEC and intra-channel nonlinearity compensation are evaluated through cross-layer network simulations, which integrate closed-form expressions of quality of transmission into routing, modulation level and spectrum allocation (RMSA). An adaptive FEC assisted RMSA is proposed and proved to improve the network performance by optimizing the FEC overhead assignment for individual paths. Numerical simulations also show considerable performance improvement by deploying shorter span-length fiber links without dispersion management, and imperceptible influence of intra-channel nonlinearity compensation for flexible grid networks under very heavy traffic. These results provide valuable suggestions for physical layer fiber deployment and application of novel impairment mitigation techniques on elastic optical networks, such as intra-channel nonlinearity compensation as well as soft-decision FEC.