Abstract
With the growth of traffic volume and the emergence of various new
applications, future telecom networks are expected to be increasingly
heterogeneous with respect to applications supported and underlying
technologies employed. To address this heterogeneity, it may be most cost
effective to set up different lightpaths at different bit rates in such a
backbone telecom mesh network employing optical wavelength-division
multiplexing. This approach can be
cost effective because low-bit-rate services will need less grooming (i.e.,
less multiplexing with other low-bit-rate services onto high-capacity
wavelengths), while a high-bit-rate service can be accommodated directly on
a wavelength itself. Optical networks with mixed line rates (MLRs), e.g.,
10/40/100Gb/s over different wavelength channels,
are a new networking paradigm. The unregenerated reach of a lightpath
depends on its line rate. So, the assignment of a line rate to a lightpath
is a tradeoff between its capacity and transparent reach. Thus, based on
their signal-quality constraints (threshold bit error rate), intelligent
assignment of line rates to lightpaths can minimize the need for signal
regeneration. This constraint on the transparent reach based on threshold
signal quality can be relaxed by employing more advanced modulation formats,
but with more investment. We propose a design method for MLR optical
networks with transceivers employing different modulation formats. Our
results demonstrate the tradeoff between a transceiver's cost and its
optical reach in overall network design.
© 2010 IEEE
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