Optical multi-band OFDM switching technology

With the continuing growth of traffic, improving the flexibility and the transparency of optical networks are very important challenges that operators have to face. In this paper, we present a networking technique based on optical multi-band Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing. The optical multi-band OFDM approach enables optical switching at fine granularity in a highly spectrum-efficient manner. We study the performance of this approach in term of blocking compared to mono-band opaque and mono-band transparent in an optical core network. We show that the flexibility offered by optical multi-band OFDM is efficient in term of blocking and that the sub-band granularity has an important impact on the blocking ratio.