Optimal Design of Cost- and Energy-Efficient ScalablePassive Optical Backbone Networks

Abstract: Advances in optical coherent transmissions and electrical compensation technologies have stimulated the exploration of novel optical network architectures. Filterless optical backbone networks (F-OBNs) eliminate or minimize the usage of active photonic reconfigurable components, which is also referred to as passive OBN. By introducing passive splitters and combiners to interconnect the fiber links, this type of networks have been proposed as a cost- and energy-efficient alternative to active optical switching networks. However, F-OBN suffers from a constraint on wavelength reuse due to its broadcast nature. Consequently, this architecture always requires more resources, i.e. higher number of wavelengths, than the active optical switching networks. To address this issue, another passive approach for optical core network, i.e., semi-filterless OBN (SF-OBN) has been introduced. By utilizing passive colored components, e.g., Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG), red/blue filters, etc., at some selected nodes, the SF-OBN is able to improve the wavelength usage while keeping the similar level on cost and energy consumption as FOBN. In this thesis project, an optimization model for wavelength assignment and filter placement in SF-OBN has been developed. F-OBN can be considered as a special case without any filter in SF-OBN. Using integer linear programming (ILP) formulation, the model aims to minimize the total number of wavelengths required in the network given the number of filters. Furthermore, wavelength usage, cost and energy consumption in active optical switching, F-OBN and SF-OBN have been compared in order to evaluate the performance of the each network architecture.