Ultra-fast self-restoring optical WDM channels with enhanced service availability

The next generation optical network will transport all existing types of payload, synchronous and asynchronous, and all types of traffic, voice, video and internet. However, because of the very high aggregate traffic per optical fiber, it is required to exhibit fast service protection. This is accomplished with a protection strategy at different levels, network, node, link, and service in order to meet network and service availability. At the link level, service availability depends by and large on signal quality performance and autonomous protection mechanisms. However, such strategy is only effective if link performance is monitored in-service that autonomously triggers a switch to protection as soon as performance falls below a threshold level. In this paper we present a self-monitoring and self-healing method applicable to optical WDM networks.