An efficient add/drop architecture for large-scale subsystem-modular OXC

Abstract

We propose a novel add/drop architecture that suits recently proposed cost-effective large-scale optical cross-connect (OXC) nodes. The proposed architecture connects each transponder bank to a limited number of incoming/outgoing fibers and attains virtually the same routing performance as the ideal add/drop architecture. This is made possible by our newly developed routing and wavelength assignment algorithm that considers the add/drop constraint. In combination with the subsystem-modular OXC node architecture, significant hardware scale reduction can be yielded. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the hardware scale of the proposed add/drop architecture is reduced by 40 % at the cost of slight decrease in throughput.