it can also be more easily maintained. When provisioni ng new wavelengths, only
the end terminals for that circuit need to be visited, whereas the other architectures
will frequently require that transponders be installed at midpoints.
The number of transponder pairs needed for each architecture is summarized in
Table 8.1. This example was intentionally simplified—only a short segment of a
network was considered, and only end-of-life traffic was modeled, without any of
the complications that can be caused by wavelength blocking when traffic grow s
randomly. However, the trends illustrated in this example are in agreement with far
more detailed studies that have taken traffic growth, and even relative equipment
costs, into account [4, 5]. The exampl ...