Maximizing the Transmission Rate in Optical Systems using Swarm Intelligence

Optical networks are currently the only technology capable of providing extremely high data transmission rates. Because of this, systems must be increasingly efficient and immune to failures. One of the ways to improve network efficiency is to use dynamic systems. One of the solutions is the use of ACOP (Adaptive Control of Operating Point) techniques, which consists of autonomously choosing the best operating point for optical amplifiers on the link, thus providing the best configuration in terms of QoT (Quality of transmission). Unlike the previous works that focused on optimizing QoT and OSNR (Optical Signal-To-Noise Ratio), our proposal is focused on maximizing the transmission rate. In this paper, we deploy a global optimizer, called Particle Swarm Optimization, to solve the ACOP problem and choose the best configuration for an optical link concerning the transmission rate. We showed that our proposal outperforms the previous ACOP approaches found in the literature for a set of link scenarios concerning the transmission rate.