Soft failure localization during commissioning testing and lightpath operation

In elastic optical networks (EONs), effective soft failure localization is of paramount importance to early detection of service level agreement violations while anticipating possible hard failure events. So far, failure localization techniques have been proposed and deployed mainly for hard failures, while significant work is still required to provide effective and automated solutions for soft failures, both during commissioning testing and in-operation phases. In this paper, we focus on soft failure localization in EONs by proposing two techniques for active monitoring during commissioning testing and for passive in-operation monitoring. The techniques rely on specifically designed low-cost optical testing channel (OTC) modules and on the widespread deployment of cost-effective optical spectrum analyzers (OSAs). The retrieved optical parameters are elaborated by machine learning-based algorithms running in the agent's node and in the network controller. In particular, the Testing optIcal Switching at connection SetUp timE (TISSUE) algorithm is proposed to localize soft failures by elaborating the estimated bit-error rate (BER) values provided by the OTC module. In addition, the FailurE causE Localization for optIcal NetworkinG (FEELING) algorithm is proposed to localize failures affecting a lightpath using OSAs. Extensive simulation results are presented, showing the effectiveness of the TISSUE algorithm in properly exploiting OTC information to assess BER performance of quadrature-phase-shift-keying-modulated signals, and the high accuracy of the FEELING algorithm to correctly detect soft failures as laser drift, filter shift, and tight filtering.