OADMs & ROADMs - Optical Add Drop Multiplexers In Depth

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Parallel OADMs [Optical Add Drop Multiplexers] are easy to manage but often have a high insertion (add-delete) loss. Serial OADMs have a lower pass through loss but often have a higher add/drop insertion loss also known as grooming for wavelength and sub-wavelength control or routing. Grooming is the process of adding, deleting, or changing routes of optical links. Optical Transponders add photonic or electronic switch to avoid wavelength blocking found in Serial and Parallel switches and add grooming (add/drop) features, scalability to thousands of wavelengths, and other emerging benefits.

In a 10 Gigabit and 40 Gigabit working system, there will likely be both OOO - (All Optical) cross connects and OEO (Optical Transponder) cross connects. Eventually, bitrate photonic switches will replace any electronic cross connects. This concept is also referred to as ROADM [Reconfigurable OADM]. An OVPN [Optical Virtual Private Network] distributes bandwidth to customers in the form of optical bandwidth rather than electrical signals. Optical Couplers are send to multiplex (mix) optical fiber energy.

• FBTC [Fused Biconical Tapered Coupler]
  Two inputs/outputs
• Star coupler or optical crossconnect
  X (variable) inputs/outputs

Optical Multiplexers are called by many names, from OXC [Optical X = cross connect], Lambda MUX, Wavelength Multiplexer, Tunable Transponder, and others. Check with manufacturers for specific naming conventions and product names.

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