Architectural options for metropolitan-area WDM networks

The proliferation of fiber optic technologies and rapid improvement in component price to performance ratio has opened a wide space for architecting metro scale optical networks. At the same time, the recent slowdown of the telecommunication industry has made it difficult for equipment vendors to differentiate themselves while still meeting the cost objectives. In this presentation, we review the architectures and technologies used to construct metro optical networks and discuss the implications of recent component development on network architectures. The trade-offs of different approaches will be compared.