Sparse regeneration in a translucent WDM optical network

Recent research implies that transparent optical WDM networks have difficulty in overcoming transmission impairments introduced by long-haul fibers and cascading optical components while opaque networks are not cost-efficient because a large number of wavelengths need optical-electronic and electronic-optical conversions at every intermediate node. This paper proposes an alternate approach to fully transparent and fully opaque optical networks for operating a wavelength routed optical network. In this paper, the architecture of regeneration node that performs sparse regeneration (or translucency) is modeled. Both static and dynamic regeneration schemes are discussed. The regeneration demands generated from call blocking and signal quality requirements are addressed. Two implementation strategies for incorporating sparse regeneration are introduced and algorithms are proposed for the regenerator placement, and their relative merits are studied.