Network Performance of ROADM Architecture Enabled by Novel Wideband-integrated WSS

Nowadays, optical transport and data center networks utilize wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) and band division multiplexing (BDM) as possible solutions to increase the capacity to support the ever-increasing traffic demand. It is an alternative solution to simple spatial division multiplexing (SDM) intended to utilize more than one fiber per link. In this perspective, we propose a new modular photonic integrated multi-band wavelength selective switch (WSS) to implement a novel reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) architecture. The proposed WSS can operate on a broad spectrum range, covering the three S+C+L bands, and is potentially scalable to large numbers of output fibers and routed channels while maintaining a small footprint. We investigated the network performance assessment of the ROADM architecture based on the proposed multi-band WSS on a German network, and a detailed comparison is given for both SDM and BDM solutions. Results show that the increase in network capacity by exploiting more bands in the cost-efficient BDM scenario is quite close to the SDM scenario using existing infrastructure replicated over multiple fibers.