The massive deployment of 5G and beyond will require high capacity and low latency connectivity services, so network operators will have either to overprovision capacity in their transport networks or to upgrade the optical network controllers to make decisions nearly in real time; both solutions entail high capital and operational expenditures. A different approach could be to move the decision making toward the nodes and subsystems, so they can adapt dynamically the capacity to the actual needs and thus reduce operational costs in terms of energy consumption. To achieve this, several technological challenges need to be addressed. In this paper, we focus on the autonomous operation of Digital Subcarrier Multiplexing (DSCM) systems, which enable the transmission of multiple and independent subcarriers (SC). Herein, we present several solutions enabling the autonomous DSCM operation, including: i) SC quality of transmission estimation; ii) autonomous SC operation at the transmitter side and blind SC configuration recognition at the receiver side; and iii) intent-based capacity management implemented through Reinforcement Learning. We provide useful guidelines for the application of autonomous SC management supported by the extensive results presented.
Optical network automation requires accurate physical layer models, not only for provisioning but also for real-time analysis. In particular, in-phase (I) and quadrature (Q) constellation analysis enables deep understanding of the characteristics of optical connections (lightpaths), e.g., their length. In this paper, we present methods for modeling lightpaths based on deep learning. Specifically, we propose using autoencoders (AEs) and deep neural networks. Models are trained and composed in a sandbox domain with the information received from the network controller and sent to the node agent that uses them to compare the features extracted from the received signal and the expected features returned by the models. We investigate two different use cases for lightpath analysis focused on lightpath length and optical signal power. The results show a remarkable accuracy for the lightpath modeling and length prediction and a noticeable performance of the AEs for unsupervised IQ constellation feature extraction and relevance analysis.
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