Design and simulation of the light-trail node for mesh WDM networks

Light-trails have been proposed as a solution for optical networking to provide support for emerging services such as video-on-demand, pseudo-wires, data-centers, etc. Node architecture and its transmission performance are one of the most important issues for the physical layer of light trail network. In this paper, the light trail node architectures designed specially for the mesh topology WDM network are addressed. A novel node architecture is proposed, which supports both global wavelength switching and local access wavelength switching with lower costs. In order to verify the transmission performance of the proposed node architecture, a DWDM based optical communication platform is built. Extensive simulations are made for the light trails when changing the LT node number from three to six. In the mean time, the optical spectrums of signal and noise as well as the eye diagrams of OSC channel, local access wavelength channel and global wavelength channel are measured and recorded. Simulation results show that the light trail which adopted the proposed LT node architecture can travel up to five nodes. In this case, the BER of the OSC channel is 1.73e-015 and Q factor is 7.86. The BER of the local access wavelength channel is 1.84e-016 and Q factor is 8.14. The BER of global wavelength channel is 3.53e-015 and Q factor is 7.78. Hence, the proposed light trail node architecture can meet the requirement of physical layer at mesh WDM networks for most cases. © 2013, Walter de Gruyter GmbH. All rights reserved.