Optical-layer traffic grooming at an OFDM subcarrier level with photodetection conversion of an input optical OFDM to an electrical signal

1. A reconfigurable add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) node, comprising:

one or more reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer subsystems, each configured to accept an input signal and to pass said input signal to each other ROADM subsystem for retransmission;

an add/drop aggregator configured to receive the input signals from each of the ROADM subsystems and to control adding and dropping operations on the input signals;

a grooming subsystem, comprising:

at least two receivers, each configured to receive an input signal having one or more modulated subcarriers; each said optical receiver having a photodetector for converting the respective optical input signal into a respective electrical signal;

a grooming processor configured to arrange the modulated input subcarriers at the subcarrier level into one or more modulated output subcarriers according to a grooming operation such that the modulated subcarriers are not demodulated or decoded prior to grooming, said grooming processor being a radio frequency RF processor for processing the electrical signals at a subcarrier level to produce an RF orthogonal frequency division multiplexing signal OFDM signal; and

a transmitter FOR modulating the groomed RF OFDM signal by conversion of the groomed RF OFDM into an optical signal.

2. The ROADM node of claim 1 , wherein said at least two optical input signals have different optical wavelengths and each input signal has different OFDM subcarriers, said optical receivers being merged as a combined optical receiver.

3. The ROADM node of claim 2 , wherein said combined optical receiver uses a passive optical coupler to combine all of said input signals, said input signals have distinguishable wavelengths avoids an issue of optical signal contention or interference.

4. The ROADM node of claim 2 , wherein said photodetectors are replaced by a single photodetector for detecting a combined optical signal from said combined optical receiver, said optical input signals all having distinguished subcarriers avoids an issue of subcarrier contention.

5. The ROADM node of claim 4 , wherein output of said single photodetector includes a mixed signal, thereby eliminating a need for a radio frequency RF mixer, with no subcarrier shifting required, said RF signal is the target groomed signal.

6. The ROADM node of claim 4 , wherein output of said single photodetector directly used drives said transmitter.