Management and Control of Intelligent Optical Networks

INTRODUCTION TO OPTICAL NETWORKING Recent years have witnessed rapid improvements in optical technologies, resulting in dramatic increases in both transmission and switching rates. Progress in optical networking components, such as lasers, amplifiers, filters and fibers, has enabled the development of systems capable of transmitting hundreds of channels, each at speeds up to 10 Gbps, on a single fiber. At the same time, the proliferation of the Internet and the introduction of new applications such as sharing of audio and video files have led to substantial changes in traffic profiles. IP traffic is growing at such an explosive rate that it is dominating all other types of traffic, including voice traffic. Doubling times for IP traffic are now measured in months, not years. Future applications, such as video on demand and web agents, are likely to continue or even accelerate these traffic growth rates. As traffic is increasing and traffic patterns are changing, new networking paradigms are required. Despite the fast pace of progress in packet processing equipment, such as IP routers and ATM switches, it is becoming increasingly harder for such network elements to keep up with the increases in traffic. At the same time, it is recognized that the complexity of full packet processing is not required in every node of future communication networks. New technologies, such as MPLS (Rosen, Viswanathan & Callon, 2001) attempt to utilize circuit-switching concepts for use in datagram networks. Fortunately, the wi espread commercialization of optical technology and the rapid improvements in optical networking components have led to the emergence of high bandwidth transmission and switching equipment, operating at the