Wavelength-domain simulation of multiwavelength optical networks

This paper presents an efficient simulation method for the design of the optical transport layer of large-scale multiwavelength optical networks. According to this method, computations are performed in two complementary steps. During the first step, the powers of optical signals, amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise, and linear optical crosstalk are calculated at all points in the network. During the second step, the distortion and the overall performance of selected optical paths in the network are calculated. Each simulation step requires a different computer representation of optical signals and network components. A large part of this paper is devoted to the description of the wavelength-domain representation used during the first simulation step. In wavelength domain, optical signals are represented by their carrier wavelength and average power, exclusively. In addition, the network components are fully characterized by their loss or gain as a function of wavelength. The phase-transfer functions of the network components are discarded. These simplifications result in a dramatic increase in execution speed. During the second simulation step, optical signals are represented by their temporal waveforms. Linear optical network segments are replaced by an equivalent channel. The link between the two simulation steps is explained in detail. The remainder of the paper is devoted to the implementation of a network simulation tool based on the above method in the context of the multiwavelength optical networking (MONET) project. To illustrate the capabilities of the MONET simulator, a mesh of 4/spl times/4 wavelength-selective cross-connects (WSXCs) and wavelength add-drop multiplexers (WADMs) is studied and the crosstalk performance is determined.