Economic optical networking in the metropolitan area
The rapid introduction of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology in long distance fiber optic communication networks which has been observed in the recent years has been driven by line economy. Not merely the ability to overcome fiber scarcity, but also the savings associated with the replacement of many electronic regenerators by fewer optical amplifiers, have motivated the carriers to employ WDM. These arguments do not often apply to optical networking in metropolitan areas because transmission distances are short. For this reason, metro-WDM has been deployed in a few rare cases only, though it has been widely discussed by a broad scientific and industrial community. In this paper, an advanced operational concept for all optical transport networks in the metropolitan area is introduced. It focuses on node economy, i.e., the technical concepts to provide gigabit services access to the transport network at minimum cost, characterized by the following basic features: protocol independence, monitoring, protection and fast bandwidth provisioning.
wavelength division multiplexing optical transport networking communication networks operations managed fiber optical crossconnecting customer premises equipment