Mixed channel traffic grooming with crosstalk awareness and shared backup path protection in IP over multicore fibre elastic optical networks

Abstract

Abstract Multicore fibre elastic optical networks (MCF-EONs) offer a promising route to overcome the capacity limit of single-core systems, but practical deployment is hindered by inter-core crosstalk and by the poor resource efficiency of dedicated protection. Here we address mixed channel traffic grooming in IP over MCF-EONs protected by shared backup paths, in which working and protection flows can be aggregated onto common optical channels subject to crosstalk constraints. We develop a double auxiliary-graph routing, core and spectrum assignment framework (Double-AG-RCSA) that jointly coordinates IP-layer grooming with crosstalk aware optical-layer provisioning. Simulations on two backbone topologies equipped with 7-core and 19-core fibres show that the proposed framework reduces the maximum used frequency-slot index by up to 33%, lowers the average inter-core crosstalk by about 6 dB, and decreases transponder usage by 28 to 35% relative to representative baselines, while eliminating crosstalk-threshold violations. The results demonstrate that cross-layer coordination of grooming, crosstalk aware provisioning and shared backup protection improves survivability, spectrum efficiency and signal quality in multi-layer optical networks. The framework is compatible with existing control planes and can be extended to dynamic traffic and larger topologies.