THE ALL-OPTICAL NETWORK: WHEN AND HOW

摘要

In reality today, the network is being built and will continue to be built out of an interconnection of all-optical islands. An intelligent optical network weaves these islands together with O/E/O and O/O/O OXC's of various sizes to form a scalable, robust and future proofed, end-to-end network. Over the coming years, advances in hard-optics technology will enable larger and better islands, and larger and better OXC's will interconnect these islands. The industry will move from an initial deployment of switches in critical parts of the network to networks with switching everywhere. It is the network software, the soft-optics, which will allow these new technologies to be incorporated into the network already being built today. The technology changes taking place today are changing networks for the better. More revenue-generating wave-based services with enhanced value-add; greater profitability through more bandwidth and more efficient utilization of precious fiber; longer distances between nodes, increasingly deployed in fully meshed topologies; less dependence on the physical with virtual, software-based feature sets in modern optical networking systems; continued elimination of the limitations that have plagued the past.