Passive ROADM Flexibility in Optical Access With Spectral and Spatial Reconfigurability

An energy-aware solution for physical-layer reconfigurability in metro-access networks is presented. The dynamicity of optical switching is introduced in nodes that are perceived as fully-passive by the network. Energy scavenging at low optical feed level of -10dBm supports field-deployment without local electrical power supply. Two types of network nodes are demonstrated experimentally. First, a resilience node is evaluated for fast protection switching in 10.7 ms at the feeder segment. Optical switching is further exploited for the purpose of dynamic allocation of spectral slices and routing in a new class of reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer. The spectral bandwidth of drop segments can be extended on demand while intranetwork communication among different segments of the access network is also enabled. Finally, we discuss the potential for realizing self-powering by means of tapping optical signals traversing the access network rather than utilizing a dedicated pump source.