Reduction of wavelength blocking through partitioning with wavelength convertors

Wavelength translation is still a controversial subject in the optical network research world. From simulation results of different groups we may, however, conclude that the increased management complexity, if no wavelength translators are used, may be a stronger point to justify wavelength translation than the performance increase, which is relatively small. Most of the performance comparisons between wavelength translated networks [with virtual wavelength paths (VWP)] and wavelength routed networks [with wavelength paths (WP)] done so far assume a fixed traffic matrix.