Design and simulation of a ROADM-based DWDM network

Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexers, ROADMs, are key enablers of the modern optical communication services to support the remote provisioning of the optical paths and reconfiguring the network topology. According to the variety of the characteristics and architectures of ROADMs, there are some tradeoffs for ROADM-based DWDM network designers. In this paper different architectures and characteristics of ROADMs are addressed. Three ROADM architectures are proposed and finally, a five-node DWDM network based on the proposed ROADM architectures is designed in order to investigate two major issues of these kinds of networks. One of these issues is the effect of adding/dropping of channels on the passed through channels quality. The other issue is the effect of optical amplifiers input power fluctuation on the quality of received signals. The former is shown through simulation and the latter is investigated through measurement. The simulation and measurement results show that in ROADM-based DWDM networks, the wavelengths must be managed precisely to avoid the network performance degradation.