Cost Benefit Analysis of Elastic and Mixed Line Rate Optical Network Models

Network traffic continues to grow at more than 30 percent per year and we either have to install new optical infrastructures or upgrade our optical networks to meet the increasing demands. Installing new fibers seems very costly the network operators considering the heterogeneity of optical networks with some consumers requiring low bit rate and others requiring high bit rate demands. As an alternative, we can use the existing fiber infrastructure to meet the traffic demands by aggregating both high and low bit rate demands or using a single type of rate-tunable technology to handle the increasing demands. This paper analyzes the two planning strategies-all period planning and incremental planning- for allocating resources in an increasing traffic and shows the pros and cons that a network operator may experience in case of using either elastic or mixed line rate optical networks.