  Flexible optical network is a promising technology to accommodate
high-capacity demands in next-generation networks. To ensure uninterrupted
communication, existing lightpath provisioning schemes are mainly done with the
assumption of worst-case resource under-provisioning and fixed channel spacing,
which preserves an excessive signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) margin. However, under
a resource over-provisioning scenario, the excessive SNR margin restricts the
transmission bit-rate or transmission reach, leading to physical layer resource
waste and stranded transmission capacity. To tackle this challenging problem,
we leverage an iterative feedback tuning algorithm to provide a just-enough SNR
margin, so as to maximize the network throughput. Specifically, the proposed
algorithm is implemented in three steps. First, starting from the high SNR
margin setup, we establish an integer linear programming model as well as a
heuristic algorithm to maximize the network throughput by solving the problem
of routing, modulation format, forward error correction, baud-rate selection,
and spectrum assignment. Second, we optimize the channel spacing of the
lightpaths obtained from the previous step, thereby increasing the available
physical layer resources. Finally, we iteratively reduce the SNR margin of each
lightpath until the network throughput cannot be increased. Through numerical
simulations, we confirm the throughput improvement in different networks and
with different baud-rates. In particular, we find that our algorithm enables
over 20\% relative gain when network resource is over-provisioned, compared to
the traditional method preserving an excessive SNR margin.
