Impact of Joint and Independent Switching Paradigms on Routing Capacity of Contention/-less SDM-ROADM Design

We report a method to evaluate the switching capacity of ROADM nodes for space division multiplexed (SDM) networks considering the joint and independent switching of spatial channels. We account for total switching functions (routing and add/drop) and quantify the impact of wavelength contentional and partial wavelength-contentional (PWC) features and the reduction of switching capacity with respect to colorless, directionless, and contentionless (CDC) SDM-ROADM. We observe that the performance of PWC SDM-ROADM with large number of contentional WSS units converges towards CDC SDM-ROADM.