New wavelength interchangeable cross-connect architectures with reduced complexity

We present several new optical cross-connect structures capable of wavelength conversion. The new structures use fewer wavelength converters than previous structures. We describe an effective approach to best use wavelength converters when the input/output fibers of an optical cross-connect do not carry an identical number of wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) data channels. It is shown that the hardware complexity of the new structures can he further reduced if a small but acceptable blocking probability is allowed.