Review of Mixed Line Rate and Elastic Optical Network

As there is a tremendous increase in multimedia services such as internet protocol television, interactive games, videos etc. which require large bandwidth, better spectral efficiency and high data rate, it has become the need of the day to explore new techniques which can fulfill these requirements. To deal with the tremendous increase in traffic, optical network with multiple lines with different data rates, mixed line rate or multi line rate (MLR) and elastic optical network can be considered as a better option. The advanced optical communication technologies such as mixed line rate along with elastic optical network can cope with the high data rates up to 1Tb/s. Mixed Line Rate or multi line rate network uses multiple modulation formats and different data rates, elasticity in the network also add many benefits like low cost, better capacity of network and handles increased data rates. By exploiting mixed line rate networks (MLRs) and different modulation formats, cost effective optical networks can be designed. Advanced modulation formats like QPSK, 16 QAM, OOK can be used to make the bit rate higher and the system spectral efficient. The next generation optical networks are considered to be heterogeneous in nature as they use different modulation formats with different data rates so that they can cope with the demand of versatile data rate of the users.