Impact of optical transparent reach on the performance of translucent multi-granular optical path networks

We investigate the impact of optical transparent reach on the design of translucent multi-granular optical WDM networks that utilize waveband switching. It is verified that the optical transparent reach limit strongly affects the efficiency of multi-granular optical path networks. The dependencies of port count, number of fibers required and network cost on the optical transparent reach are evaluated under different traffic demands. Longer optical reach offers better network performance in large traffic area while the performance improvement becomes much less in small traffic area. It is also shown that the optical reach impacts the optimal value of waveband capacity in translucent multi-granular optical path networks to only a limited extent.