Modeling reliability constraints in modern Optical Network Simulation Environments

Simulation is widely recognized as an extremely effective option to avoid the implementation of costly and sophisticated testbed infrastructures for testing, validation, and assessment of control plane protocols and algorithms in large-scale optical network scenarios. Its primary goal is to provide sustainable, realistic, and accuratemodels for analyzing specific system properties by resulting in an approach that becomesmore effective with the growth of both the size of the infrastructure of interest and the observation timespan. However, the absence of optical network simulation environments that adequately address complex constraints such as node and link reliability represents a significant gap in current simulation research and development efforts. Accordingly, in this work, we present ourmodeling experience concerning the impact of potential physical-level failures involving network nodes and communication links in network-wide state information and operations. Themodel has been implemented in our existing SimulNet simulation environment in order to include reliability-related concerns in the routing and wavelength assignment framework. This results in amodern optical network simulation framework adopting a flexible networkmodel, and capable of considering also specific failure probability constraints in the lightpath selection process.