Capacity and Energy Consumption Comparison in Translucent versus Transparent Multi-band Designs

A comparison of the capacity and energy consumption in translucent and transparent multi-band (from S- to U-band) optical network designs is reported. We show that enabling more bands in the transparent network design leads to higher capacity than exploring optical signal regeneration (translucent network design) in already deployed bands. Moreover, the results suggest that both the S- and U-band lead to similar capacity improvement in a transparent network design. However, we find out that deploying a C+L+S-band multi-band network is slightly more power-efficient than deploying the equivalent C+L+U-band scenario.