Joint multicasting optical cross-connect employing both space splitters and multi-wavelength converters

As bandwidth-intensive and time-sensitive streams applications such as high-definition television (HDTV) get popular, there rises a demand of supporting multicast communication directly at optical layer on next-generation optical networks. The multicast-capable optical cross-connect (MC-OXCs) is the necessary device to implement multicasting at optical layer. The functional building blocks for MC-OXC are light splitters (space splitters) or multi-wavelength converters (frequency splitters). The space splitter has no wavelength conversion capability, whereas the frequency splitter has limited fanout, decreased optical signal-to-noise ratio and also is expensive. We therefore proposed a tradeoff architecture called joint multicasting capable optical cross-connect (jMC-OXC) integrating both space splitters and multi-wavelength converters. In this paper, we investigate the network performance and the physical transmission performance on the jMC-OXC architecture by dynamic simulation and experimental demonstration. Three simulation schemes are designed and the results show that the network performance of the jMC-OXCs with limited multi-wavelength converters can obtain a close performance to that with full multi-wavelength converters. A prototype of jMC-OXC is examined and its bit error rate (BER) performance is tested after passing the multi-wavelength converters.