Patent ID: 7236703

Claim:
An optical wavelength division multiplexing and transmission apparatus, comprising a master rack and at least one slave rack to be combined with the master rack, wherein the master rack has a plurality of optical connectors configured to connect to a respective slave rack, and the master rack accommodates: a first optical wavelength multiplexer to multiplex a number of prescribed optical wavelength signals corresponding to a prescribed wavelength distribution and to output as a first multiplexed signal; a synthetic optical wavelength multiplexer to multiplex the first multiplexed signal and a second multiplexed signal and to output as a synthetic multiplexed signal; and a first optical amplifier in which the synthetic multiplexed signal output from the synthetic optical wavelength multiplexer is multiplied, and the at least one slave rack is connected to an optical connector of the plurality of optical connectors, and the at least one slave rack accommodates: a second optical wavelength multiplexer to multiplex a group of optical wavelength signals having a wavelength distribution that is different from the prescribed wavelength distribution and to output as the second multiplexed signal; and a second optical amplifier in which the second multiplexed signal output from the second optical wavelength multiplexer is multiplied, wherein a number of optical wavelength signals in the synthetic multiplexed signal in excess of the number of prescribed optical wavelength signals is divided into a plurality of slave rack groups and one slave rack is connected to the master rack for each slave rack group of the plurality of slave rack groups.