Optical Node Architectures for Elastic Networks: From Static to Architecture on Demand

We present candidate optical node architectures for the implementation of elastic networks. The proposed architectures are compared in terms of their performance, flexibility and functionality, which ranges from flexible spectrum switching to the provisioning of adaptive architectures with support of elastic multi-dimensional switching. Results show that high node flexibility is advantageous for implementing elastic optical networks that require efficient transport and on-demand functionality such as spectrum defragmentation.