Impact of Waveband and Wavelength Switching in the Next-Generation Optical Networks

The rapid and significant increase in Internet traffic, driven by developments in 5G/6G mobile communications, video streaming, cloud computing, and other high-bandwidth applications, challenges the capabilities of existing optical network infrastructures. This progress necessitates the creation of optical networks that can be expanded, have large capacity, and are affordable. This article evaluates the performance of a new multi-band optical cross-connect (OXC) architecture that uses waveband (WB) switching technologies at the network level. WB switching, a technique that combines many wavelengths into larger bands for more efficient routing, is a potential solution to overcome future optical networks’ scalability and complexity issues. WB switching streamlines network design and decreases operating costs by decreasing the number of necessary switching components, in contrast to standard wavelength (WL) switching, which treats each wavelength as a separate route. Our study, using extensive simulation evaluations, demonstrates the possibility of this design to provide the extensive parallelism and bandwidth capacity required for next-generation bandwidth-intensive optical networks. The results suggest that WB switching can greatly improve network performance by providing a simplified yet effective method for managing increasing data traffic. This represents a feasible way to achieve bandwidth-rich and highly parallel optical networks for the 6G era and beyond. This contribution establishes the foundation for future studies on enhancing optical network designs to address the increasing requirements of global communication without going into the details of routing and spectrum assignment schemes.