Wavelength routing in a photonic network

摘要

In a WDM optical communications network, each node (18) has an optical switching arrangement (20) and a bank of converters (40), each converter (40) being capable of carrying out optical to electric conversion and electric to optical conversion for an individual WDM channel. The optical switching arrangement (20) is controllable to route selected channels to a converter (40) for regeneration or wavelength translation based on performance measurement. This enables the location at which regeneration takes place to be selected as a function of the actual signal degradation along the network. This enables margins to be reduced, so that the location of regeneration for a particular channel is optimum.