Synthesis, resiliency and power efficiency of function programmable optical nodes

Due to the large transmission speeds and enormous volumes of transferred data, network availability performance is one of the key issues in optical long-haul networks, comprising nodes implemented by optical cross-connects (OXCs). In this context, the design of OXCs is becoming very challenging since they have to support both legacy lower bit-rates and future highspeed super-channels by means of flexible allocation of spectral resources, and at the same time provide high availability of established connections. In this paper we study the availability and power consumption of different node architectures. We focus on the design of the new generation of synthetic programmable OXCs based on the Architecture on Demand concept which can reduce the number of utilized node components when a certain part of signals is switched at the fibre level, resulting in lower mean down time and power consumption compared to traditional node architectures.