As the bit rates of routed data streams exceed the throughput of single wavelength-division multiplexing channels, spectral and spatial traffic aggregation become essential for optical network scaling. These aggregation techniques reduce network routing complexity by increasing spectral efficiency to decrease the number of fibers, and by increasing switching granularity to decrease the number of switching components. Spectral aggregation yields a modest decrease in the number of fibers but a substantial decrease in the number of switching components. Spatial aggregation yields a substantial decrease in both the number of fibers and the number of switching components. To quantify routing complexity reduction, we analyze the number of multi-cast and wavelength-selective switches required in a colorless, directionless and contentionless reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer architecture. Traffic aggregation has two potential drawbacks: reduced routing power and increased switching component size.

Date Published: 7 February 2015
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 9389, Next-Generation Optical Communication: Components, Sub-Systems, and Systems IV, 93890B (7 February 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2082656

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9389:
Next-Generation Optical Communication: Components, Sub-Systems, and Systems IV
Guifang Li; Xiang Zhou, Editor(s)