Towards an all New Submarine Optical Network for the Mediterranean Sea: Trends, Design and Economics

Optical networks are seeking for extra bandwidth from the time they were born. The reason for that lies to vast number of users in both internet and private networks and, of course, to bandwidth hungry applications. Space Division Multiplexing (SDM) aims to meet future needs by incorporating multiple spatial channels in Multi-Core Fibers (MCFs) and/or Multi-Mode Fibers (MMFs). Although SDM has already been applied to terrestrial networks, the submarine SDM territory is currently under investigation. As submarine networks carry almost all intercontinental traffic it is straightforward that employing SDM in these networks is of critical importance. In this paper we survey on new trends for optical submarine networking and we propose an all new SDM optical network for the Mediterranean Sea. The proposed network is based on rules and objectives applied in terrestrial networks: redundancy, cost efficiency, performance and quick failure recovery. We analyze relative network costs considering most of the equipment needed and indicate minimum cost cases.\