Pan-European Optical Transport Networks: An Availability-based Comparison

The traffic to be carried by today's European backbone networks increases very rapidly. An important portion of this traffic consists of data traffic (mainly IP-related). In the future data traffic is expected to become the abundantly dominant traffic type, while voice traffic will only account for a very small portion of the total traffic volume. In this paper, some network topologies for such a pan-European fiber-optic backbone network are presented (more details can be found in [1]). These topologies are compared in terms of the efficiency of the network design both from a cost and capacity point of view and in terms of the availability of the connections routed over this network. In order to be able to assess the network topologies under realistic circumstances, the expected traffic demand is forecasted. This enables to make the comparison for the current traffic volume as well as for the traffic patterns of the future. As not all types of (data) traffic require the same degree of survivability and in order to leverage the total capacity cost of the network design, a distinction is made between different recovery options in the optical layer for the different traffic types considered.

[1]  R. Ranganathan,et al.  Benefits of grooming capable cross-connects in a Pan-European Optical Network , 2001, Proceedings 27th European Conference on Optical Communication (Cat. No.01TH8551).

[2]  Benedetto Daino,et al.  Study on the Implementation of Optical Transparent Transport Networks in the European Environment—Results of the Research Project COST 239 , 2000, Photonic Network Communications.

[3]  Didier Colle,et al.  Data-centric optical networks and their survivability , 2002, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..

[4]  Piet Demeester,et al.  Capacity vs. availability trade-offs in mesh-restorable WDM networks , 2001 .

[5]  P. Green,et al.  Progress in optical networking , 2001, IEEE Commun. Mag..

[6]  A. Dwivedi,et al.  Traffic model for USA long-distance optical network , 2000, Optical Fiber Communication Conference. Technical Digest Postconference Edition. Trends in Optics and Photonics Vol.37 (IEEE Cat. No. 00CH37079).

[7]  Frank A. Tillman,et al.  System-Reliability Evaluation Techniques for Complex/Large SystemsߞA Review , 1981, IEEE Transactions on Reliability.

[8]  R. E. Wagner,et al.  Metropolitan network traffic demand study , 2000, LEOS 2000. 2000 IEEE Annual Meeting Conference Proceedings. 13th Annual Meeting. IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society 2000 Annual Meeting (Cat. No.00CH37080).