Sparse Distributed Fiber Optic Sensor Placement in Metropolitan and Datacenter Elastic Optical Networks

Abstract

Distributed Fiber Optical Sensing (DFOS) leverages optical backscattering signals to predict failure events and enable proactive Just-In-Time (JIT) restoration. Modern network infrastructures have optical components and fibers as key enablers of high throughput and low latency. The integration of sensing features in this optical infrastructure adds features such as network diagnosis, spatial positioning and sensing, and opens up opportunities for the implementation of intelligent network control expected for the next-generation networks. In this paper, we study how the quantity and the placement of the DFOS devices in an all-optical network can mitigate failure events. In our evaluation, we consider metropolitan and data center elastic optical networks. This work also evaluates sensing devices with various prediction time capabilities, in order to assess their effectiveness when considering a variable number of deployed devices and different placement heuristics. The evaluation uses key performance metrics, including the bandwidth blocking rate, number of affected circuits by failure events, and the service downtime. Simulation results demonstrate that the Greedy Shortest Path Coverage (GSPC) heuristic substantially reduces the number of circuits affected by failure when DFOS devices cover only 5% of links, while 25% coverage shows a performance gain comparable to the full coverage scenario, which is an opportunity for significant cost reduction. Finally, for the 5% sensing coverage scenarios, our results illustrate that prediction windows of 15 ms and 7.5 ms are sufficient for JIT restoration in metropolitan and data center networks, respectively.