Optical cross-connect systems for restoration of backbone fiber networks

Summary form only given. As the capacity of backbone networks is becoming larger, restoration against fiber/cable failures must become faster, because large amounts of data would be lost during the failure. The optical cross-connect (OXC) technology is an attractive alternative for fast restoration, and has the potential to provide bandwidth-management capability in future wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) networks. This paper describes newly developed OXC systems with a low insertion loss of 1.16 dB and a high-speed restoration of <150 ms.