Interconnection of WDM self-healing rings

This paper discusses the interconnection architectures for WDM SHRs. We describe here a new kind of optical cross-connect (OXC) suitable to interconnect SHRs, which has been used in our all-optical network testbed “SHAONET”. Based on it, we propose a new architecture to interconnect WDM SHRs, that is to interconnect SHRs in a cascading configuration physically. Comparison with other architectures, the limited number of rings that can be interconnected by optical amplifiers in cascade, and the wavelength assignment algorithm for this interconnecting form are discussed