TWDM multichannel lightwave hypercube networks

Abstract

The hypercube is a widely used interconnection topology as it presents a lot of attractive properties. Recently, the hypercube has been proposed as a virtual topology for TWDM multihop lightwave networks based on optical passive star couplers. However, in most of previous works, each station in the network has only one fixed or tunable transmitter and one fixed or tunable receiver. The tunable transmitters and receivers suffer from high cost, long tuning delay and small tunable range. While the fixed transceiver configuration has low cost, its performance such as transmission concurrence is greatly limited. In this paper, we propose the transceiver configuration that each station uses multiple fixed transmitters and multiple fixed receivers. This configuration can greatly improve the performance while being able to emulate the tunability of the tunable transceivers without suffering tuning delay. We will present a wavelength assignment scheme for the transceivers. The maximal concurrence that can be achieved by the network is also given in terms of the number of transmitters and receivers at each station.