Scalability analysis of wave-mixing optical cross-connects

In this paper, we analyze the scalability of a class of optical cross-connects (OXCs) that uses bulk wave-mixing converters to simultaneously convert multiple distinct wavelengths. For large number of wavelengths, wave-mixing OXCs provides good scalability by reducing the number of required wavelength converters through conversion sharing. However, as the number of wavelengths increases, so does the crosstalk noise in shared converters, which may limit the scalability of the network. Thus, a fair analysis for the scalability of wave-mixing OXCs must take into consideration the benefits of conversion sharing as well as the practical limitations imposed by such sharing. This paper presents an analysis of the scalability of wave-mixing OXCs. It is shown that, for W ¿ 32 and for any number of fibers, wave-mixing OXCs have a lower conversion cost compared to the optimal OXCs that use conventional converters that converts a single channel at a time.