Design of Ring and Mesh based WDM Transport Networks

The advent of reconfigurable nodal elements, such as Optical Add/Drop Multiplexers (OADM) and CrossConnects (OXC) for Wavelength Division Multiplexed (WDM) networks, has led to a myriad of possible network architectures for the optical layer. In this paper we describe different architectures for resilient ring and mesh based WDM networks, and compare these architectures from a conceptual viewpoint. The network design process is heavily influenced by the choice of the network architecture, because the different architectures have very distinct design issues. We describe the different design issues for mesh and ring based networks and give an overview of possible solution methods for the specific design problems. Some of this theory is put in practice in a case study, considering the design of realistic networks based on different network architectures. The results of this case study confirm the conceptual statements that we made. © 2000 SPIE/Baltzer Science Publishers 1388 6916/2000 $15.00 Docu-Arijs 12-07-2000 22:17 Pagina 25