Abstract

The term convergence is getting a lot of airplay in the market these days. The market positioning of convergence today is the transport of multiple services such as data and voice over a common networking layer. Visionaries for convergence at the IP layer assume that enterprises are willing to migrate their entire networks to this new architecture. The reality is that many enterprises have legacy networks in place and desire a graceful transition to this new converged architecture. This paper will introduce an alternative approach to convergence at the optical SONET/SDH layer that will allow the support of legacy protocols as well as facilitate a transition to the new converged network vision.

© 2005 Optical Society of America