Optimal placement of monitoring equipment in transparent optical networks

Abstract

The problem of optimal placement of monitoring equipment has been studied in other types of networks such as ad-hoc networks, sensors networks, etc., but to the best of our knowledge, it has been marginally studied for transparent optical networks, although transparent networks offer important advantages such as high capacity or the capability to transport information with different bit-rates, protocols and modulation formats. However, these networks have some limitations from the failure management point of view since failures may traverse longer distances and their effect are spread through the network, thereby increasing the number of alarms received by the network management and causing the degradation of more connections. The optimal placement of monitoring equipment gets even more interesting when considering the high cost of the monitoring equipment. This paper presents the problem definition and a posible solution for any topology of the transparent optical network independently of the lightpaths that are actually established.