Optical networking that exploits massive wavelength/spectrum and spatial parallelisms

As DWDM transmission offers enhanced wavelength/spectrum parallelism, the capacity of optical networks has been substantially increased. Due to the theoretical capacity limit of C-band transmission over single-mode fibers, research into new frequency bands and parallel fibers has become very active. However, the hardware scale of current optical cross-connect nodes will explode with greater wavelength/spectrum and spatial parallelism. Three optical node/network architectures are presented in this paper that take advantage of one or both of these parallelism technologies. These architectures will provide a baseline for cost-effective and bandwidth-abundant future optical networks based on massive parallelism.