OPN04-5: Hybrid Low Loss Architecture for Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexer

Reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs) manufactured with different designs and technologies are soon going to be available in the market. Unfortunately, the latest available ROADM architectures are either suffering from high insertion losses or high manufacturing costs that prevent their rapid deployment in the network. In this paper, we propose a low-loss hybrid architecture for a ROADM subsystem that combines the best features of the latest available ROADM designs. A metro network testbed has been designed and simulated in order to compare the performance of different ROADM modules. The obtained results indicate that our proposed hybrid-ROADM module performs better than the latest available ROADM subsystems and would reduce the overall network operating costs.