Architecture and performance of grouped ROADM rings with shared optical amplifier and grouped add/drop ports for hybrid data center network

We propose a novel reconfigurable optical add drop multiplexer (ROADM) rings architecture for the hybrid data center network where a pair of optical amplifiers is shared in a maximum number of ROADMs group to reduce cost. We show through simulation that the network proposal can almost achieve the same bit error rate performance of the conventional rings network with fully installed optical amplifiers, and 50% of optical amplifiers can be saved. The narrowing effect of cascading wavelength selective switches limits the number of ROADMs in such architecture to 54 regardless of the number of optical amplifiers provided. Based on those results, an ROADM with grouped add/drop ports is also proposed to further increase the capacity of network, which is 4 fold of the original ROADM rings architecture.