Minimizing equipment and energy cost in mixed 10G and 100G/200G filterless horseshoe networks with hierarchical OTN boards

Emerging 5G services are changing the way operators manage and optimize their optical metro networks, and the transmission technology and network design process must be tailored to the specific conditions in this segment of the network. Ensuring cost-efficient and energy-efficient network design requires novel approaches that optimize across all network layers. Therefore, to moderate the growth of operators’ expenses, in this paper, we investigate low-cost and energy-efficient cross-layer deployment of hierarchical optical transport network (OTN) boards minimizing equipment and energy consumption cost in mixed 10G and 100G/200G filterless metro networks. We propose an integer linear programming (ILP) model and a genetic algorithm (GA) approach that decide: (i) the node structure by deploying various stacked OTN boards (performing traffic-grooming at the electrical layer) and (ii) lightpath establishment considering coherent and non-coherent transmission technologies. Simulative results on real filterless horseshoe networks with real traffic matrices show that our proposed approaches achieve up to 50% cost savings compared to real-world benchmark deployments.