Impact of Transponder Architecture on the Scalability of Optical Nodes in Elastic Optical Networks

The elastic optical network has proven to be a promising network architecture for handling the rapid growth in IP traffic in the optical layer in a spectrum-efficient manner. This study reveals the optical node requirements in elastic optical networks by comparing multiple network architectures using an integrated resource allocation scheme that considers both network and node parameters. Evaluations show that the multi-flow (MF) transponder-based elastic optical network architecture is superior to two other architectures in terms of scalability of optical nodes and network costs.