Survivability Schemes in Optical Cross Add and Drop Multiplexer

Abstract

Optical cross add drop multiplexer (OXADM) is a newly invented device in optical networks. It is designed with a combined concept of optical cross connect (OXC) and optical add drop multiplexer (OADM) which is potentially used to increase efficiency and flexibility of optical network particularly in metropolitan ring and mesh configuration. The OXADM node focuses on providing functionalities of transport, multiplexing, routing, supervision, termination and survivability in the optical layer for both ring and mesh topologies. The main function of OXADM is to reconfigure the optical channel path while implementing add and drop function simultaneously. The designed 4-channel OXADM device is expected to have maximum operational loss of 6 dB for each channel. OXADM also provide survivability through restoration against failures by means of linear, multiplex and ring protection to both configurations. Hybrid restoration technique with OXADM enables the linear, ring and multiplex protection mechanism to be integrated in single optical network, and it will be activated according to the degree and types of failure. Degradation is expected at about 2 dB in output power with respect to normal condition in ring protection activation. The test was carried out at 2.5 Gbps with BER 1times10-10 for linear protection while BER 1times10-19 (to west) and 1times10-13 (to east) were used for ring protection. The paper also calculates the OSNR according to the percentage of network failures and span variation. The method of this study involves the building and characterizing of two OXADMs, simulating by using Optisystem and modeling them analytical. Loss characterization and measured OSNR are compared with the analytical values. The result of prototype characterization was shown in our previous work.