Blocking performances for fixed/flexible-grid and sub-band conversion in optical networks

Abstract

With the rapid growth of data rate, the optical network is evolving from fixed-grid to flexible-grid to provide spectrum-efficient and scalable transport of 100Gb/s services and beyond. In this paper, we analyzed the blocking performances for fixed/flexible-grid and sub-band conversion in optical networks. Flexible-grid and sub-band conversion demonstrated the good performances on traffic blocking and spectral utilization. Moreover, wavelength converter plays a key role in improving the blocking performances of fixed/flexible-grid networks.