Optical multi-band OFDM switching technology

Abstract

International audienceWith the continuing growth in the amount of traffic, improving the flexibility and the transparency of optical networks is a very important problem facing operators today. In this paper, we present a networking technique based on optical multi-band Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing. The optical multi-band OFDM approach enables optical switching at fine granularity in a highly spectrum-efficient manner. We study the performance of this approach in term of blocking compared to mono-band opaque and mono-band transparent OFDM technologies in an optical core network. We show that the flexibility offered by optical multi-band OFDM is efficient in term of blocking and that the sub-band granularity has an important impact on the blocking ratio