A Comparative Study on Variable vs. Fixed Subchannel Symbol Rates with Different Modulation Formats in WSS Filtering Penalty-Aware Elastic Optical Networks

摘要

The impact of the wavelength selective switch (WSS) filtering penalty on the signal integrity of elastic wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) network becomes increasingly important as the optical channel spacing goes finer in order to achieve higher spectrum utilization. Subcarrier multiplexing can be applied to mitigate the WSS filtering penalty. We investigate, by simulations, the use of multiple subcarriers with variable symbol rate per subcarrier and different modulation formats to minimize the transmission penalty caused by WSS filtering. Lightpath feasibility in two elastic WDM network topologies is also studied using the described technique.