Source power management in transparent wavelength-routed mesh networks

Wavelength-routed WDM networks are expected to offer on-demand lightpath services in the near future. Lightpath bit error rate (BER) is one of the most important quality of service (QoS) performance measures. In a transparent WDM network, an admitted lightpath can potentially impact the BER performance of many other lightpaths that are already established, and hence admission control becomes necessary. In order to reduce the number of BER-related call blockings, a dynamic power management algorithm in contrast to the traditional fixed source power assignment is proposed in this paper. Our study shows that having adjustable source powers can achieve the same BER performance as in the fixed-power case while using much lower average source powers. As a result, detrimental fiber nonlinearities are significantly reduced, thus leading to much improved network BER performance.