Approach to the scalability of a European multiwavelength multihop optical network

The multihop transmission technique has many promising features for large‐scale multiwavelength optical networking. This paper proposes an approach to the flexibility in designing scalable multihop networks and suggests the deployment of this approach in an ongoing European research project. The general features of the ShuffleNet, an important example of multihop networks, are reviewed. It is shown that the ShuffleNet has certain inherent limitations. A new architecture, the Multi‐ShuffleNet, is proposed to get around these limitations. The approach introduced thereby is that a multihop network, based on a standard interconnection pattern, such as the ShuffleNet, can be designed more easily and can perform better if broken down into a set of smaller subnetworks. These subnetworks, taken together, may have the same overall size as that of the original network. Each of them, however, may not necessarily have the same interconnection pattern. This concept is suitable for the realization of the European ultra‐high capacity network, being envisioned through the framework of the COST 239 project. ©1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.