This study compares the performances of waveband protection and wavelength path protection in survivable hierarchical optical path networks. Network costs and the number of switching operations necessary are evaluated for different ratios of protected demand. Numerical results demonstrate that waveband protection can drastically decrease the number of switching operations in the case of failure, while both waveband and wavelength path protection effectively reduce the network resources needed compared to single layer optical path networks.

This paper proposes optical node architectures for the single-layer optical cross-connect (OXC) and hierarchical OXC (HOXC) that utilize dedicated add/drop switches for originating/terminating traffic at a node. For both single-layer OXC and HOXC, three architectures with different restrictions on add/drop capabilities are presented. The performance of the proposed architectures is compared through numerical experiments. The architectures significantly reduce total switch scale and minimize necessary switch size while attaining colorless, directionless and contentionless capabilities.

This paper presents a novel “virtual fiber” network service that exploits wavebands. This service provides virtual direct tunnels that directly convey wavelength paths to connect customer facilities. To improve the resource utilization efficiency of the service, a network design algorithm is developed that can allow intermediate path grooming at limited nodes and can determine the best node location. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed service architecture.