Opportunities for optical protection and restoration

Summary form only given. Experimentation with optical switching technology by various telecom companies for healing an optical network in the face of equipment and fiber failures has made headlines recently. This talk attempts to check whether such optical protection and restoration (optical recovery henceforth) makes practical sense, given similar mechanisms that are already available at the higher layers (e.g., SONET/SDH or ATM). We then discuss the implications of various network parameters on the implementation of optical recovery.