On Routing, Wavelength, Network Coding Assignment, and Protection Configuration Problem in Optical-Processing-Enabled Networks

In optical-processing-enabled network, transitional lightpaths crossing the same node could be optically encoded to each other to achieve greater spectral efficiency. In this context, we present a new research problem, entitled, routing, wavelength, network coding assignment and protection configuration (RWNCA-PC) arisen in exploiting photonic network coding (NC) for dedicated path protection in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networks with an extra degree of freedom in the selection of protection triggering mechanism, that is, network-side and client-side, tailoring to each connection. In order to maximize the NC benefits, we thus provide a weighted multi-objective optimization model for solving RWNCA-PC problem so as to minimize the wavelength count as the strictly prioritized goal and the redundant resources measured by the number of client-side connections as the secondary objective. Numerical results on the realistic COST239 network reveal that a saving of up to 25% wavelength resources could be achieved thanks to the optimal use of NC compared to the non-coding designs and among coding-aware designs, the use of mixed protection configurations would be spectrally more efficient than the design with only network-side protection scheme. Our proposal yields the highest spectrum efficiency compared to all reference designs and moreover, features an average saving of more than 40% transponder count compared with its single objective counterpart.