The existing dimensioning strategy for translucent, sub-wavelength switching architectures relies on over-provisioning, and consequently, overuse of costly, power-consuming optical-electrical-optical (O/E/O) regenerators. In addition, due to a variety of external phenomena, many physical layer impairments are time-varying, and hence, can strongly degrade network performance. In this work, we introduce a Cross-Layer Optical Network Element (CLONE) used for the dynamic management of physical layer impairments in the network. We investigate the impact of real-time impairment aware routing in a CLONE-enabled optical network with sub-wavelength switching. Simulation results show that the CLONE-enabled network architecture provides improvements in: (1) energy efficiency by optimizing the usage of regenerators, and (2) network performance in terms of the packet loss probability.