Energy Efficient Multi-band Optical Networks Using Inter-Band All-Optical Wavelength Converters

We investigate the enhancement of energy efficiency in multi-band optical networks through the deployment of inter-band all-optical wavelength converters (AO-WCs). To address the ever-increasing traffic demand, multi-band wavelength-division multiplexing transmission technologies are widely deployed to expand network capacity. However, in all-optical networks, the efficiency of wavelength resource utilization faces limitations due to wavelength continuity constraints. To cope with this issue, AO-WCs are intensively investigated for energy-efficient all-optical networking. AO-WCs significantly reduce energy consumption compared to current optical-electrical-optical wavelength converters (OEO-WCs). However, a typical inter-band AO-WC merely converts an input C -band (or L-band) wavelength to the mirror-image position of the output L-band (or C-band) wavelength. This limitation may impact the effectiveness of AO-WCs in terms of energy efficiency and network resource utilization. We thus quantitatively evaluate the performance of multi-band optical networks with inter-band AO-WCs. Our evaluation results demonstrate that inter-band AO-WCs can accommodate 20% more traffic demand compared to scenarios without any wavelength converters, while significantly improving energy efficiency compared to OEO-WCs.