Optical Hardware Tradeoffs for All Optical Multicast

Abstract

All Optical WDM Networks are fast becoming the natural choice for future backbones and in order to meet the exponentially increasing traffic demands, it would be beneficial to support all optical multicast. One way to support multicast is to provide optical splitters at various switching nodes along the network. The main contribution of this thesis is in demonstrating that all optical multicast can be made practical for both 1:2 splitters and 1:N splitters through the proper incorporation of in-line EDFA's and other optical hardware components available off the shelf. Using electronics for 3-R regeneration at the intermediate nodes is costly and hence our model uses EDFA's. Most previous work in this direction has addressed multicast feasibility from an architectural standpoint while this thesis discusses issues from a physical designer's perspective. An All Optical CAD simulation tool from Virtual Photonics was used to simulate a variety of multicast networks taking into account relevant Nonlinear effects such as chromatic dispersion, four wave mixing, stimulated Raman scattering and all phenomena commonly encountered in Cascaded EDFA chains such as Accumulated Spontaneous emission noise, SNR Transients and Gain Saturation.