Impact of OXC architecture on the accumulation of intraband crosstalk in WDM optical networks

Optical crosstalk imposes a major limit on the practical implementation of optical cross-connects(OXCs).Intraband crosstalk characteristics of three typical OXC nodes based on dilated Benes(DB) network and generally modified dilated Benes(GMDB) network are studied.Results show that OXC composed by DB and GMDB network can remove the first order crosstalk successfully.At the same time,the power penalty induced by intraband crosstalk is studied through numerical simulation.Compared with DB network,GMDB network can eliminates crosstalk effectively.The crosstalk level of optical devices required in GMDB network is about 5dB lower than that in DB network to keep the power penalty below 1dB at the bit error rate of 10-9,which indicates that the OXC structure plays an important role in eliminating optical crosstalk.