%I IEEE %B Optical Network Design and Modeling (ONDM), 2016 International Conference on %T Programmable filterless network architecture based on optical white boxes %D 2016 %O © 2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. %X We propose and evaluate a novel architecture enabling high-capacity, resource efficient and agile elastic optical networks. It is based on sliceable bandwidth-variable transponders and optical white box switches which route optical signals without filtering them. Instead of using active filtering components, each node is equipped with an optical white box based on a programmable optical switch that serves as an optical backplane. It provides interconnections between input/output ports and passive splitters and couplers. Due to signal broadcast and the absence of filtering (so-called drop-and-waste transmission), some of the signals appear on unintended links which can lead to an overhead in spectrum usage. To address this issue, we formulate the problem of signal routing, modulation format and spectrum assignment in programmable filterless networks based on optical white boxes as an integer linear program (ILP) with the objective to minimize the total spectrum usage. Simulation results indicate that our proposed solution obtains a beneficial tradeoff between component usage and spectrum consumption, using a drastically lower number of active switching elements than the conventional networks based on hard-wired reconfigurable add/drop multiplexers, and lowering the maximum used frequency slot by up to 48% compared to existing passive filterless networks. %A M Furdek %A A Muhammad %A G Zervas %A N Alloune %A C Tremblay %A L Wosinska %J 2016 20th International Conference on Optical Network Design and Modeling, ONDM 2016 %L discovery1533957 %K Filterless optical networks; coherent elastic transmission; optical white box; wavelength routing; mathemat- ical programming