Machine Learning Assisted Provisioning of Time-Varying Traffic in Translucent Optical Networks

The overall network volume in backbone optical networks is constantly growing, composed of many smaller network services with increasing trends and various seasonality. Due to the recent advances in machine learning algorithms, short- and long-term traffic fluctuations can be forecasted. Consequently, the backbone optical network can be adapted to traffic changes aiming to improve its performance. However, an important challenge lies in developing effective optimization methods capable of adapting to traffic changes to leverage the knowledge about the traffic. To this end, this paper addresses the time-varying traffic in spectrally-spatially flexible optical networks (SS-FONs), which are a promising technology to mitigate backbone network requirements of vast traffic volume transmission. The main contribution of this paper is twofold. Firstly, we introduce a new traffic prediction method using multioutput regression and temporal features to forecast traffic between all node pairs and integrate this prediction method into an optimization framework developed for dynamic resource allocation in translucent SS-FONs with time-varying traffic. Secondly, we evaluate potential network performance improvements from periodic lightpath reallocation through extensive numerical experiments. According to the results of experiments run on two representative optical network topologies, the proposed approach with periodic resource allocation allows achieving up to 7.8 percentage points reduction of bandwidth blocking compared to the reference scenario without reallocation. Consequently, the network requires up to 23.4% fewer transceivers to deliver the same traffic in considered scenarios and thus the power consumption savings are provided.