NEW WAVELENGTH-ROUTED ARCHITECTURE FOR WAVELENGTH-DIVISION MULTIPLEXED WANS : CONCEPT AND DEMONSTRATION

After a brief presentation of the context of the French transport network, a new cell-based photonic network architecture is presented. This architecture, in which wavelength routing is carried out, fulfills major identified requirements for high-capacity wavelength-division multiplexed wide area networks. This architecture relies on the concatenation of geographically distributed cells, each of them being arranged in a broadcast and select topology. Simplicity, high flexibility, multiple bit rate, upgradability, and scalability are the main features of this cellular architecture, which also exhibits broadcasting and intrinsic equipment protection. Implementation issues and key components are reviewed. The laboratory testbed of this network is then described. It consists of four network nodes separated by 60 km, implementing one complete cell which comprises 16 wavelengths with a mean frequency spacing of 200 GHz. Four of the 16 channels are carrying 2.488 Gbit/s data streams. System validations and measurements performed are presented. From the measured cascadability results, this architecture proves to be implementable with commercially available components. Upcoming technologies that could further improve the architecture performances are addressed.