Optical Node Architectures That Utilize Dedicated Add/Drop Switches to Realize Colorless, Directionless and Contentionless Capability

This paper proposes optical node architectures for the single-layer optical cross-connect (OXC) and hierarchical OXC (HOXC) that utilize dedicated add/drop switches for originating/terminating traffic at a node. For both single-layer OXC and HOXC, three architectures with different restrictions on add/drop capabilities are presented. The performance of the proposed architectures is compared through numerical experiments. The architectures significantly reduce total switch scale and minimize necessary switch size while attaining colorless, directionless and contentionless capabilities. key words: optical cross-connect, colorless/directionless/contentionless, waveband, multi-layer optical paths