Photonic network coding and partial protection in optical-processing-enabled network: two for a tango

The age of acceleration is taking place, driven by the revolutionary digital transformation creating basically a digital version of the physical world. Massive amount of data has thus been generated ranging from wearable devices monitoring our physical health every single millisecond to autonomous vehicles generating an order of magnitude of Terabytes hourly to even astronomical activities producing an order of Exabytes on a daily basis and then ultra-broadband Internet comes into play, moving such data to the cloud. As a result, Internet traffic has been experiencing explosive growth and in this context, optical transport networks forming the backbone of the Internet are pushed for transformation in system capacity. While the intuitive solution of deploying multiple fibers can address the pressing demand for increased capacity, doing so does not bring improvements in economic of scales with respect to cost, power consumption and spectral efficiency. This necessitates for a complementary approach so that the fiber capacity could be utilized in a more efficient manner. Indeed, optical-processing-enabled network has been emerging as a new architectural paradigm to attain greater fiber capacity thanks to permitting the superposition of in-transit lightpaths at intermediate nodes for optical signal processing purposes. In this paper, we focus on innovative techniques, that is, photonic network coding and partial protection, to reduce the effective traffic load for optical transport networks adopting optical-processing-enabled architecture. Specifically, the application of photonic network coding is investigated by upgrading the functionalities of intermediate nodes with all-optical processing (i.e., encoding and decoding) capabilities. Besides, partial protection relying on the premise of providing just enough bandwidth in case of failure events is exploited for saving the redundant protection capacity. That it takes two to tango, combining photonic network coding and partial protection therefore bring to light new opportunities and challenges. In mining such new avenue, we present insights on how to derive compounding gains to maximize spectral efficiency via a case study.

Automated summary

The age of acceleration driven by digital transformation is generating massive data and increasing demands for network capacity. Optical transport networks are facing challenges in transformation to meet these demands. Innovative technologies such as optical network coding and partial protection can reduce traffic load and improve spectral efficiency in optical-processing-enabled architectures.