Provisioning in Multi-Band Optical Networks

Multi-band (MB) optical transmission promises to extend the lifetime of existing optical fibre infrastructures, which usually transmit within the C-band only, with C+L-band being also used in a few high-capacity links. In this work, we propose a physical-layer-aware provisioning scheme tailored for MB systems. This solution utilizes the physical layer information to estimate, by means of the generalized Gaussian noise (GGN) model, the generalized signal-to-noise ratio (GSNR). The GSNR is evaluated assuming transmission up to the entire low-loss spectrum of optical fiber, i.e., from 1260 to 1625 nm. We show that MB transmission may lead to a considerable reduction of the blocking probability, despite the increased transmission penalties resulting from using additional optical fiber transmission bands. Transponders supporting several modulation formats (polarization multiplexing - PM - quadrature phase shift keying - PM-QPSK -, PM 8 quadrature amplitude modulation - PM-8QAM -, and PM-16QAM) from Oto L-band are considered. An increase of the accommodated traffic with respect to the C-band transmission only case, ranging from about four times with S+C+L-band and up to more than six times when transmitting from E to L-band is reported.