Cost evaluation of reconfigurable optical Add/Drop multiplexers

Reconfigurable Optical Add/drop Multiplexers, ROADMs, are key enablers of the modern-day optical communication services to support the remote provisioning of the optical links and realize the reconfigurable optical network topologies. According to different features supported by ROADMs, there are some tradeoffs for the optical network designers in choosing the architecture which is suitable for their application. In this paper, main characteristics of the ROADM are stated. Then, ten different architectures of ROADMs are investigated. Finally, the ROADM architectures are evaluated in terms of the important design costs in order to give a practical insight for network planning. The comparison of ten different architectures is performed based on three objectives: the characteristics provided by ROADM architectures, the optical power loss and the implementation price.