Application of Machine Learning in Fiber Nonlinearity Modeling and Monitoring for Elastic Optical Networks

Fiber nonlinear interference (NLI) modeling and monitoring are the key building blocks to support elastic optical networks. In the past, they were normally developed and investigated separately. Moreover, the accuracy of the previously proposed methods still needs to be improved for heterogenous dynamic optical networks. In this paper, we present the application of machine learning (ML) in NLI modeling and monitoring. In particular, we first propose to use ML approaches to calibrate the errors of current fiber nonlinearity models. The Gaussian-noise model is used as an illustrative example, and significant improvement is demonstrated with the aid of an artificial neural network. Further, we propose to use ML to combine the modeling and monitoring schemes for a better estimation of NLI variance. Extensive simulations with 2411 links are conducted to evaluate and analyze the performance of various schemes, and the superior performance of the ML-aided combination of modeling and monitoring is demonstrated.