DO AGEING OF MARGINS BECOME MORE ATTRACTIVE IN WDM NETWORKS WITH 64 GBAUD TRANSPONDERS AND REGENERATORS?

Optical transport networks are evolving towards a full exploitation of physical layer resources thanks to the combination of elastic optical transponders and optical performance monitoring. If the quality of transmission achieved on a lightpath is provided by coherent receivers, elastic transponders can adjust their data rate to take advantage of the actual margin with respect to minimum quality requirements, along the whole life of the network. As a new generation of elastic optical transponders is becoming available, bringing a significantly richer set of data rate solutions, we analyse on two WDM core networks the benefit achievable by network planning considering up-to-date elastic transponders. By accounting for both actual routing of channels and different intermediate regeneration strategies, we highlight the network capacity increase and we quantify the savings in terms of transponders when planning with ageing of margins instead of network end of life margins.