Fiber Path WDM Optical Network with Minimum Cost

Noriaki KAMIYAMA  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications   Vol.E87-B   No.9   pp.2648-2658
Publication Date: 2004/09/01
Online ISSN: 
DOI: 
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Fiber-Optic Transmission for Communications
Keyword: 
optical cross-connect,  optical fiber path,  network cost,  greedy algorithm,  

Full Text: PDF>>
Buy this Article



Summary: 
The WDM optical networks currently being deployed are opaque optical networks, in which each link is optically isolated by transponders. To reduce the number of expensive transponders and switching ports, a hierarchical optical architecture consisting of all-optical waveband switching and opaque OEO switching has been proposed. Although this architecture requires fewer transponders and ports, it also requires a large number of wavelength (waveband) multiplexers and demultiplexers. Switching the optical path solely at the fiber level (i.e., by using fiber cross-connects, or FXCs) is desirable as a way to reduce the total node cost. If all the core nodes in an optical network are FXCs, however, the grooming of wavelengths for the optical fibers is only possible at the edge nodes. This leads to poor utilization of wavelength resources when there is only demand for small numbers of wavelengths, and as a result, the link cost increases. This problem can be solved by adding an OEO grooming function to some of the FXCs. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for designing optical cross-connect (OXC) functions on the basis of the FXC, thus minimizing the total network cost.