Availability comparison of opaque and translucent networks

In this paper, port unavailability and annualized return rate relating to opaque and translucent optical networks are reported for unprotected and 1+1 protected connections. For translucent networks, three representative conditions in terms of traveled kilometers-km-and traversed nodes-N-are described. For the node architectures, the traffic matrix and the failure rates considered in this study, translucent networks are more interesting than opaque ones from availability and reliability point of view. The benefit in terms of unavailability is on average 17%; concerning the expected number of failures, the gain is on average 19%