On the Design Trade-Offs of ROADM Architectures

Abstract:
The design of a ROADM architecture is depending on many criteria among with network functionality requirements, cost, footprint and scalability. But architectural choices also impact the performance of the optical channels being transported. The motivation of the present paper is to examine the performance impact of exemplary architectures in dependence on modulation formats and network configurations. The impact of ROADM architecture on the transmission performance in different network scenarios is carefully analysed taking into account both the express layer and the add/drop structure. 100G QPSK and 200G 16-QAM are chosen as representative modulation formats as their design requirements are significantly different not only in the express layer but also in the add/drop part. The papers demonstrates that the reach impact of the ROADM architecture can be significant and should be taken into account when optimizing ROADM architectures for each network domain.