Resilient grouped routing optical networks with finely granular protection

A novel resilient optical routing network architecture that adopts finely granular protection and finely granular add/drop is presented. The routing scheme defines optical pipes such that multiple optical paths can be carried by each pipe and can be dropped or added at any node on the route of a pipe. The routing scheme also makes it possible to enhance frequency utilization within pipes as we recently verified. We develop a static network design algorithm that establishes coarse granular optical pipes so that working and backup optical paths are efficiently carried by these pipes. Numerical experiments elucidate that the number of fibers in a network can be reduced up to 20% for 400Gbps channels without any modification of hardware.