Conference Paper

Hollow-core fiber (HCF) technology is evolving at a rapid pace, raising the prospects of deploying this type of fiber in a wider range of scenarios. Besides the low latency advantage, three interesting properties of HCF, compared to solid-core fibers (SCF), are the negligible nonlinearities, the (theoretical) lower losses, and the wider low-loss region. Combined, these properties can be exploited to improve reach / augment capacity in optical transport networks. However, HCF is expected to remain costlier than SCF and both fiber types may co-exist in the same infrastructure network, with the aim to balance performance and / or latency improvements with cost. Optimizing the deployment of a limited amount of HCF in a mesh network has been shown to be a complex problem, since spans are traversed by routing paths with different end nodes. The problem complexity grows when flexible-rate line interfaces are supported. This paper describes a method to optimally place a limited number of HCF spans and high-power booster/in-line-amplifiers in optical mesh networks that support flexible-rate line interfaces. Simulation results using a reference optical transport network and flexible-rate interfaces demonstrate the optimality and scalability of the proposed method.