Supportable Rates in Symmetric Blocking Wavelength Routers

Constructing an n times n non-blocking wavelength router using n times n optical cross-connects may be impractical due to certain constraints such as the cost or space limitations. Moreover, in many cases the traffic requirements can be handled without a non-blocking router. In this paper, we study blocking wavelength routers constructed using x times x, x < n optical cross-connects without wavelength conversion. We find the set of rates that can be supported between the input and output fibers of a certain set of symmetric blocking routers. We propose a method to construct blocking routers to achieve any given supportable rate in this region for any given x