On the Cost of Protection in Optical Slot Switching Rings with Elastic Transponders

For the first time, we propose an optimal network dimensioning model for studying the cost of the protection in optical slot switching metropolitan rings with elastic transponders. We study by simulations shared and dedicated path protection, for different configurations of optical slot switching rings, and for the latest experimental results on the network reach and rates. Our main result is that the cost of the shared and dedicated protection is virtually the same, in the case when transponders can be used on both fibers of the bidirectional ring. This network configuration benefits from the excellent and cheap protection. If the transponders are allocated per fiber, we showed that shared protection is up to 30% more expensive. We also show that in the latter case, the impact of reach constraint on the results is significant, and strongly impacts the cost of dedicated protection.