Hierarchical photonic LANs using spectral folding

Local area networks based on passive optical star couplers were originally proposed to exploit the enormous bandwidth of optical fiber [1]. Unfortunately, the maximum throughput of these systems is restricted by the limited number of channels which can be achieved in practice. To address this problem, two‐level hierarchical WDM LANs have been proposed [2–4]. These architectures can increase system capacity by permitting a set of local channels …