Effect of Channel Spacing on the Design of Mixed Line Rate Optical Wavelength Division Multiplexed Networks (original) (raw)

The ever increasing heterogeneity and growing traffic volume has resulted in significant innovations and paradigm shifts within the telecom backbone networks. In order to cost-effectively respond to the diverse variety of traffic requirements having heterogeneous service demands, wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) optical networks have adopted the mixed line rate (MLR) strategy. In MLR networks, many wavelength channels with various line rates can co-exist within the same fiber which, however, raises many important design issues; one of them being the choice of the channel spacing. The quality of signal is affected by the channel spacing in terms of the bit-error rate (BER), which in turn affects the maximum optical reach of the lightpaths that depends on the line rates. In regard to the aforementioned, different methods can be adopted in order to set the width of the channel spacing, viz., (a) choice of a 50 GHz uniform fixed channel spacing specified by the ITU-T grid, (b) expl...