Adaptive Quality of Transmission Control in Elastic Optical Network

Optical fiber communication is becoming increasingly important due to the burgeoning demand in the internet capacity. However, traditional wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technique fails to address such demand because of its inefficient spectral utilization. As a result, elastic optical networking (EON) has been under extensive investigation recently. Such network allows sub-wavelength and super-wavelength channel accommodation, and mitigates the stranded bandwidth problem in the WDM network. In addition, elastic optical network is also able to dynamically allocate the spectral resources of the network based on channel conditions and impairments, and adaptively control the quality of transmission of a channel. This application requires two aspects to be investigated: an efficient optical performance monitoring scheme and networking control and management algorithms to reconfigure the network in a dynamic fashion.;This thesis focuses on the two aspects discussed above about adaptive QoT control. We demonstrated a supervisory channel method for optical signal to noise ratio (OSNR) and chromatic dispersion (CD) monitoring. In addition, our proof-of-principle testbed experiments show successful impairment aware reconfiguration of the network with modulation format switching (MFS) only and MFS combined with lightpath rerouting (LR) for hundred-GHz QPSK superchannels undergoing time-varying OSNR impairment.