Performance Optimization of PLC-based ROADM Subsystem in Ring-to-Ring Interconnection

Traffic demands in the metro market are rapidly increasing due to different service applications like broadband access and video on demand. Unfortunately service providers are still using costly optical-electrical-optical (O-E-O) regenerators for ring-to-ring interconnections. This paper presents detailed features for ring-to-ring interconnections in an optical domain by using Planner Lightwave Circuit (PLC) based Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexers (ROADMs). A small modification is also proposed to the PLC-based ROADM´s architecture and extensive simulations are run to optimize their performance in the metro ring network in terms of fibre span and cascadability.