Patent 8457497 was granted and assigned to Ciena on June, 2013 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
The present disclosure provides optimized configurations for a directionless reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer application. The present invention includes an add module with improved optical signal-to-noise through placing amplifiers prior to a multi-cast optical switch. The present invention includes various drop module configurations utilizing distributed gain, channel selective filters, and bi-directional configurations to reduce power consumption and complexity. Additionally, the present invention includes an integrated broadcast and select architecture.