Protocols for Bandwidth Management in Third Generation Optical Networks

During the height of telecommunications boom all optical networking was seen as the next horizon, that would soon revolutionize the data communications world. Networking technology and service companies have been heavily investing in startups that promised to bring all optical, on demand and any bandwidth granularity solutions to the market in eighteen month or less. By the early 2001, there were several hundreds of companies focused on optical equipment development. including optical switches, optical cross-connects and similar, all coming with accompanying management software for the provisioning and control that would bring the final, all optical solution to all. A number of other service companies were focused on the delivery of next generation optically driven services, as exemplified by the emerging IXCs and CLECs in North America. The declared effect was to be a revolutionized networking, resulting in a complete shift to data based networking infrastructures.The rationale for all of the optical enthusiasm was the promise of significantly more data carrying bandwidth, new optically based service provider revenue generating service opportunities, and simplified network infrastructures that greatly reduced service provider Capex and Opex costs. New optical equipment should reduce or eliminate the costly electronic regeneration of optical signals, and new optical switching and mux equipment promised to ease the burden of path provisioning, path monitoring, and path restoration of optical data carrying paths.