Evaluations of OXC hardware scale and network resource requirements of different optical path add/drop ratio restriction schemes [Invited]

We analyze three add/drop ratio restriction schemes for reducing the hardware scale of colorless, directionless, and contentionless (C/D/C) optical cross-connects. We present three node architectures that implement the add/drop ratio restrictions of these schemes. Numerical experiments elucidate that restricting the add/drop ratios allows the hardware scale to be substantially reduced while the number of additional line fiber ports is minimal.