Effect of frequency granularity and Link Margin at 100G and beyond Flexgrid Optical Networks

The core network traffic has been increasing with the evolution of multimedia applications, rise in cloud computing and data centres. This has lead to wide heterogeneity of demands of more than 100Gbps which the current fixed grid network cannot handle. This paper focuses on the concept of Superchannel in the Flexgrid Network Paradigm and its ability to handle demands beyond 100Gbps. We show the advantages of operating at the OSNR limit with reduced Link Margin(LM) and compare the increase in network capacity at 0.1 Cumulative Blocking Probability (CBP) by using frequency granularities (FG) 50GHz and 12.5 GHz respectively. Operating at 100Gbps with FG of 12.5GHz the network capacity increases as much as 105% compared to using FG of 50GHz. Finally, we show that this capacity advantage decreases to 20% as the traffic demand increases to 1000Gbps at 0dB margin.