Optimal Waveband Switching in Optical Ring Networks

Waveband switching saves port costs in optical crossconnects by grouping together a set of consecutive wavelengths and switching them as a single waveband. Previous work has focused on either uniform band sizes or non-uniform band sizes considering a single node. In this paper, we show that such solutions are inadequate when considering the entire network, and present a novel framework for optimizing the number of wavebands in a ring network for deterministic traffic. We then consider a specific type of traffic, namely, all-to-all traffic and present bounds and heuristic solutions for the problem. Our results show that the number of ports can be reduced by a large amount using waveband switching compared to wavelength switching. We also numerically evaluate the performance of our waveband design algorithms under dynamic stochastic traffic.