TY - JOUR VL - 26 SP - 1057 JF - IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS A1 - Savory, SJ Y1 - 2014/05/15/ N2 - In elastic optical networks, digital coherent transceivers modify their symbol rate, modulation format, and forward error correction to best serve the network demands. In a nonlinear elastic optical network, these parameters are inherently coupled with the routing algorithm. We propose to use congestion aware routing in a nonlinear elastic optical network and demonstrate its efficacy for the NSFNET reference network (14 nodes, 22 links). The network is sequentially loaded with 100 GbE demands until a demand becomes blocked, this procedure being repeated 10000 times to estimate the network blocking probability (NBP). Three routing algorithms are considered: 1) shortest path routing; 2) simple congestion aware algorithm; and 3) weighted congestion aware routing algorithm with 50, 25, 12.5, and 6.25 GHz resolution flexgrids. For NBP = 1% using a 50 GHz grid, congestion aware routing doubles the network capacity compared with the shortest path routing. When congestion aware routing is combined with a 6.25 GHz resolution flexgrid, a fivefold increase in network capacity is afforded. ID - discovery1431930 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/LPT.2014.2314438 N1 - © 2014 IEEE. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. For more information, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ KW - Optical fiber communication KW - networks KW - routing KW - adaptive modulation KW - extreme value distributions TI - Congestion Aware Routing in Nonlinear Elastic Optical Networks SN - 1041-1135 AV - public IS - 10 EP - 1060 ER -