Hardware-accelerated impairment-aware wavelength assignment for transparent optical networks

Abstract

This paper reports results of an ultra-fast control plane that utilises hardware-acceleration to solve part of an impairment-aware routing and wavelength assignment algorithm for heterogeneous optical networks. The implementation incorporates vector representation of physical layer impairments and outperforms its software counterpart by exploiting the speed and inherent parallelism offered by field programmable gate array's (FPGAs). The technique is applicable to both one- and two-way reservation schemes.