Physical impairment constrained routing: Implicit signal regeneration via traffic grooming?

In this paper we present the idea to use the grooming-capability of two-layer networks not only to better handle traffic, but also to implicitly regenerate physically impaired optical signals. We propose a simple heuristic method and present simulation results on the mutual impact of grooming and physical impairments: The grooming capacity is not only used for distributed multiplexing of traffic streams, but for regeneration as well, practically, for no extra cost! I.e., although the location where the demand enters the electronic layer may change, the number of these grooming actions remains almost the same.