Comparison of CD and CDC Technologies for Flex Grid DWDM Networks

The main objective of the paper is to compare CD and CDC nodal architecture technologies for flex grid DWDM optical networks. The methodology adopted consists in optimising a DWDM network for both nodal architectures and comparing the resource utilisation. Several nature-inspired heuristic algorithms, based mainly on an evolutionary algorithm, have been specifically selected to solve the optimisation problem with realistic computational resources. Numerical experiments were carried out for two distinct backbone networks: Polish and American. Using the best of the proposed heuristic methods in terms of the value of the objective function and computation time, CD and CDC technologies were compared. The results obtained show the advantages of CDC technology over CD technology, particularly with respect to utilization of occupied frequency bandwidth of network edges.