Journal Paper

Multi-band (MB) optical transmission promises to extend the lifetime of existing optical fibre infrastructures, which usually transmit within the C-band only, with C+L-band being
also used in a few high-capacity links. In this work, we propose a physical-layer-aware provisioning scheme tailored for MB systems.
This solution utilizes the physical layer information to estimate, by means of the generalized Gaussian noise (GGN) model, the generalized signal-to-noise ratio (GSNR). The GSNR is evaluated
assuming transmission up to the entire low-loss spectrum of optical
fiber, i.e., from 1260 to 1625 nm. We show that MB transmission may lead to a considerable reduction of the blocking probability, despite the increased transmission penalties resulting from using additional optical fiber transmission bands. Transponders supporting several modulation formats (polarization multiplexing – PM – quadrature phase shift keying – PM-QPSK –, PM 8 quadrature amplitude modulation – PM-8QAM –, and PM-16QAM) from O-to L-band are considered. An increase of the accommodated traffic
with respect to the C-band transmission only case, ranging from
about four times with S+C+L-band and up to more than six times
when transmitting from E to L-band is reported.