Abstract

The Internet is rapidly becoming the most pervasive medium for communications in many parts of the world. Nonetheless, the physical layer of the Internet is constructed of young technologies that will continue to evolve over many generations. Currently, metropolitan area networking is poised to become a very quickly developing field. In today’s metro networking architectures, a node connects to only a few other nodes, or possibly only to the point-of-presence (POP) node, with static point-to-point links. These architectures assume that metro networks are used only as collection and distribution hubs for traffic to and from local networks. However, due to distributed content and applications, the common presence of storage area networks, and an increase in packet-based wireless and multi-media applications, we believe that traffic between nodes within the metro area will become the majority of the traffic. Conventional point-to-point metro architectures are not optimized for this scenario.

© 2002 Optical Society of America