Wide-sense nonblocking elastic optical switch

In this paper, we address the problem of wide-sense nonblocking operation of the elastic optical switch. The switch consists of waveband-converting switches in input and output stages, while in the center stage there is only one wavelength-selective space switch without wavelength-conversion capabilities. Two control algorithms are proposed, namely, 2-split and 3-split. For these algorithms we derived wide-sense nonblocking conditions and compared them with strict-sense nonblocking ones. The results show that the 3-split algorithm reduces the required number of FSUs to up to almost 70% of the FSUs required in the strict-sense nonblocking switching fabrics. Application of the proposed elastic optical switch in optical datacenter networks is also proposed.