Traffic grooming and spectrum assignment for coherent transceivers in metro-flexible networks

Novel distance-adaptive optical transmission technologies have been proposed to boost transceiver datarates and to enable more flexibility in the allocation of traffic flows. The application of this new class of transceivers is being widely investigated in core networks, while their suitability in the metro area is still an open issue. On one hand, the short metro distances enable the utilization of higher spectrally efficient modulation formats, on the other hand, the lower bitrate suggests to employ lower baud rate with respect to core networks. In this letter, we perform traffic grooming and spectrum assignment using transceivers with fixed baud rate of 28 and 14 GBd and distance-adaptive modulation formats in optical metro networks. Comparisons with the wavelength-division multiplexing systems running over a fixed grid show that 1) significant savings in terms of spectrum occupation can be achieved, and that 2) such savings can be effectively achieved also using lower baud rate transceivers (e.g., 14 GBd).