Dimensioning and energy efficiency of optical metro rings

Due to the ever-growing network capacity demand, energy-efficient and scalable networking solutions are needed in all networking segments. In this paper, three metropolitan ring architectures are considered and compared for resource and power utilization: Ethernet, Reconfigurable Optical AddDrop Multiplexers (ROADM), and a packet slotted scheme called Packet Optical Add-Drop Multiplexers ("POADM"), which was recently proposed. Both single and multirate scenarios are investigated. In addition, a novel resource allocation strategy for POADM multirate rings is proposed for the first time. We show through simulations that POADM allocates resources very efficiently such that multi-fiber rings can be avoided even for high loads. POADM rings are typically more energy-efficient than Ethernet and ROADM rings; introducing multirate in small POADM networks can further decrease the power requirement by up to 10% .