A novel hybrid node architecture for reducing time delay in Wavelength Division Multiplexed (WDM) translucent network

The practical deployment of widely favoured transparent optical networks is prohibitive as transmission reach of optical signals in such networks is limited by accumulation of physical layer impairments (PLIs). Translucent optical networks have thus become a viable solution and are seen as technically feasible in the near future. In translucent networks, the optical-electrical-optical (OEO) conversion process involved for both, regeneration and/or wavelength conversion leads to significant time delay in data and voice transmission, which becomes a performance bottleneck. In this paper, we propose a hybrid translucent node architecture which performs OEO conversion when 1) only regeneration or 2) simultaneous regeneration and wavelength conversion is required but uses an all-optical wavelength converter when only wavelength contention is to be resolved, thereby reducing the delay involved due to OEO conversion. Performance of the hybrid node is compared to translucent and transparent node architectures present in literature and results clearly show that the use of hybrid node gives the same blocking performance compared to nodes which use OEO conversion for both, regeneration and/or wavelength conversion but incurs less time delay. The results also indicate that there exists a definitive trade-off between cost of the network and OEO conversion time delay.