Abstract

Today’s metro optical networks were designed to carry fixed-rate telephony traffic reliably. However, over the past few years, service providers have experienced tremendous growth in demand for data traffic, so that today, in most carriers’ networks, data traffic of all types dominates the optical transport network. A carrier’s traditional connection-oriented transport network is point-to-point in nature and completely unaware of the characteristics of data traffic carried on it.

© 2005 Optical Society of America