A new waveband switching method for reducing the number of ports in wavelength-division-multiplexing optical networks☆

Abstract In this paper, we investigate the waveband switching technique and consider the problem of reducing the number of ports in optical cross-connects in wavelength-division-multiplexing optical networks. The basic idea of waveband switching is to bind several wavelengths into one waveband which can be switched by only one port so that the switches in conventional wavelength routed networks can be reduced and the cost of optical cross-connects can be saved. Since the traditional waveband switching schemes are the simple shortest route approach and the obtained paths may not be the optimal disposals for merging waveband, we propose a new heuristic waveband switching routing method. In our proposed method, we use the k -shortest path algorithm and the rerouting approach to optimize the number of ports in optical cross-connects. Simulation results show that, compared with the traditional algorithm that does not consider the waveband switching technique, the performance improvement of our proposed method is significant and promising.