Dimensioning and energy efficiency of optical metro rings

Due to the ever-growing network capacity demand, energy-efficient and scalable networking solutions are needed in all networking segments. In this paper, three metropolitan ring architectures are considered and compared for resource and power utilization: Ethernet, Reconfigurable Optical Add-Drop Multiplexers (ROADM), and an optical packet switching (OPS) scheme called Packet Optical Add-Drop Multiplexers (“POADM”), which was recently proposed. Both single and multirate scenarios are investigated. In addition, a novel resource allocation strategy for POADM-based OPS multirate rings is proposed for the first time. We show through simulations that POADM allocates resources very efficiently such that multi-fiber rings can be avoided even for high loads. Results show that OPS with POADM can be up to 2 to 3 times more energy-efficient than competing technologies.