Superchannel transmission (SCT) enables ultra-high-capacity optical networks, but tightly spaced subchannels increase inter-subchannel cross-phase modulation (iXPM), resulting in high nonlinearity compensation complexity. Perturbation-based nonlinearity compensation (PB-NLC) offers an attractive performance-complexity trade-off and its complexity depends on pulse-collision dynamics governed by chromatic dispersion and walk-off. In this work, we propose a novel reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM)-enabled wavelength-switched SCT (RWS-SCT) that optimizes dispersion and walk-off to reduce the number of pulse collisions and the PB-NLC computational complexity. In RWS-SCT, transmitter-side chromatic dispersion compensation (pre-CDC) minimizes pulse broadening, while ROADM-enabled wavelength switching reassigns subchannel wavelengths to control the walk-off between subchannels. We derive the perturbation coefficients for RWS-SCT under controlled dispersion and walk-off, and investigate their effects on pulse-collision dynamics and the distribution of iXPM coefficients. Based on this analysis, we derive an optimization metric that identifies the optimal wavelength mapping for RWS-SCT. Numerical simulations show that the proposed RWS-SCT provides significant PB-NLC complexity reduction compared to existing SCTs.
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Tharranetharan et al. (2026) studied this question.
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