Influence of the observation window size on the performance of multilayer traffic engineering

Although the Optical Transport Network, based on technologies such as Wavelength Division Multiplexing and Optical Cross-Connects, offers tremendous transportation capacity, its management requires frequent manual intervention. However, as the traffic pattern offered to today's transport networks is subject to continuous changes due to the Internet traffic dominance, an optical transport network with a smart, automatic and real-time control system, denoted as Intelligent Optical Network (ION) or Automatic Switched Optical Network (ASON), is desired by network operators. Duly and correctly retrieving the changing traffic load information is a very important factor for the successful deployment of an ION. In this paper, we discuss the influence of the observation window size used for collecting the traffic load information, on the performance of an ION. By comparing the performance of an ION using different traffic observation window sizes, we show that a smaller observation window harms the network stability; while a too large observation window worsens the network reliability. We demonstrate that a suitable traffic observation window size improves the offered Quality of Service (QoS) by reconfiguring the logical layer network at the right time and in the right way.