Modular Optical Cross-Connects (OXCs) for Large-Scale Optical Networks

Due to the explosive growth of traffic demands, large-scale optical cross-connects (OXCs) are highly desired in next-generation optical networks. However, the scalability of classical OXCs is not good in terms of the size of optical switching modules and cabling complexity to meet application requirement. To address this issue, this letter proposes a two-phase approach to construct modular large-scale OXCs, using a set of small-size OXC modules. We first decompose each optical space switch (OS) in a classical OXC to a Clos network and then merge the corresponding links and decomposed optical switching modules of different Clos networks to form small-size OXC modules, which finally yields a modular OXC. We show that the proposed modular OXC has good scalability and acceptable physical-layer performance.