Abstract
Optical access networks have been widely adopted to support the exponential
growth in bandwidth demand. To further fulfill the growth efficiently, reconfigurable
wavelength division multiplexing–time division multiplexing optical
access networks have been proposed in which optical network units can be reallocated
to another wavelength on demand. Thus, the reconfigurability allows dynamic
sharing of both wavelengths and timeslots. However, it requires a substantial
addition to capital expenditure per user, which is prohibitive in access networks.
This paper investigates an approach to preserve the merits of reconfigurability
while significantly reducing the network complexity, thus cost by adjusting
the level of flexibility. We define a parameter designated as the degree of
flexibility to indicate the level of flexibility of a network. Then, we evaluate
the performance of various degrees of flexibility based on the traffic capacity
and the power consumption. The results suggest that introducing limited wavelength
flexibility to the network significantly improves the performance in comparison
to the static network while a highly or fully flexible network can further
improve the performance but with smaller additional margins. Finally, we apply
this result to a well-known reconfigurable architecture, the broadcast-and-select,
to illustrate how the limited flexibility can help to reduce the network cost
in terms of the optical power budget.
© 2012 IEEE
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