All-Optical Slotted WDM Rings with Partially Tunable Transmitters and Receivers

The paper considers all-optical WDM rings with tunable transmitters and receivers; however, the transmitter and receiver tunability is limited to only a subset of the available wavelengths in the WDM comb. Simple expressions to compute the minimum transmitter and receiver tunability required to guarantee singlehop connectivity in an all-optical ring are first derived; then, an analytical model is presented for the computation of the maximum network throughput achievable given a source and destination tunability pattern, and a specific set of offered traffic relations. 1 Introduction The design of all-optical networks [1] must very carefully consider the technological feasibility aspects. For this reason, the first designs of all-optical networks adopted passive star topologies, and wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) approaches with receiver tunability [2]: passive star couplers were available with acceptable losses, WDM combs with a limited number of frequency channels could be e..