Impact of Lightpath Selection on End-to-End Service Orchestration in Disaggregated Optical Networks

This paper investigates the role of orchestration in lightpath selection to enable end-to-end service provisioning in disaggregated optical networks. As these networks redefine traditional optical infrastructures, the dynamic allocation of resources becomes of paramount importance to meet the escalating demands of data-intensive applications. Lightpath selection, representing the physical routes in the optical network, emerges as a pivotal factor shaping overall network performance. Through a focused exploration of the relationship between lightpath selection and service orchestration, this paper proposes a modeling approach to design resources by evidencing what is new in the Software Defined Networking (SDN) process with respect to traditional optical networks with reference to a layered representation. An analytical procedure based on classical blocking theory is presented to calculate an upper bound on the blocking introduced by Optical-Electrical-Optical (OEO) wavelength conversion. Call blocking in the range of 10-4 is shown as achievable also for large size networks providing a suitable number of wavelength converters made available by network-wide to the orchestrator as virtualized resources. Perspective research in the application of traffic theory to abstracted resources is outlined as a conclusion.