We provide network designs for optical wavelength division multiplexed (OWDM) rings that minimize overall network cost, rather than just the number of wavelengths needed. The network cost includes the cost of the transceivers required at the nodes as well as the number of wavelengths. The transceiver cost includes the cost of terminating equipment as well as higher-layer electronic processing equipment, and in practice, can dominate over the cost of the number of wavelengths in the network. The networks support dynamic (time varying) traffic streams that are at lower rates (e.g., OC-3, 155 Mb/s) than the lightpath capacities (e.g., OC-48, 2.5 Gb/s). A simple OWDM ring is the point-to-point ring, where traffic is transported on WDM links optically, but switched through nodes electronically. Although the network is efficient in using link bandwidth, it has high electronic and opto-electronic processing costs. Two OWDM ring networks are given that have similar performance but are less expensive. Two other OWDM ring networks are considered that are nonblocking, where one has a wide sense nonblocking property and the other has a rearrangeably nonblocking property. All the networks are compared using the cost criteria of number of wavelengths and number of transceivers.
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