AWG Network: A Practical Single-Hop Metro WDM Network for Efficient Uni- and Multi-Casting

Single-hop WDM networks with a central Passive Star Coupler (PSC), as well as single-hop networks with a central Arrayed-Waveguide Grating (AWG) and a single transceiver at each node, have been extensively studied as solutions for the quickly increasing amounts of unicast and multicase traffic in the metropolitan area. The main bottlenecks of these networkds are the lack of spatial wavelengths reuse in the studied PSC based networks and the single transceiver in the studied AWG based metro WDB networks. We develop and evaluate the AWG network, which is based on a central AWG and has arrays of fixed-tuned transmitters and receivers at each node. Transceiver arrays are a mature technology, making the proposed network practical. In addition, the transmitter arrays allow for hight speed signaling over the AWG while the reciver arrays relieve the receiver bottleneck arising from multicasting in conjunction with spatial wavelength reuse on the AWG. Our results from probabilistic analysis and simulations indicate that the AWG network give particularly good throughput-delay performance for a mix of unicast and multicast traffic.