Fiber Optic Network Designing, Traffic Engineering and Survivability

When talking about today's telecommunication networks, nobody will forget to mention fibre communications. As a communication medium, fibre brings a revolution of human communications to carry a huge amount of capacity in a thumb-sized fibre cable. From the initial single wavelength per fibre to today's multiple wavelengths per fibre WDM technique, optical communications is evolving towards being faster and cheaper. Presently, the most of advanced fibre communication technique based on wavelength division multiplexing has been able to carry more than 100 wavelengths per fibre and each wavelength carries up to 40 Gb/s capacity in a commercially-available system. With more hardware technical breakthrough, people are attempting to further increase the number of wavelength to up to 1000 and the capacity per wavelength up to 100 Gb/s. In the near future, it can be foreseen that each fibre will be more efficiently utilized.

Fibre communication techniques have been widely deployed today's long-haul backbone transport networks and metro area networks. This technique is now penetrating the access networks based on so-called Fibre To The Home (FTTH) technology, hoping to allow each home to be cheaply connected by a fibre, so as to provide a huge amount capacity to support the future multimedia triple-play services such as IPTV, VoIP, Internet game, etc. It can be expected that in the future fibres will be ubiquitous ranging from a backbone network, a community network, to every home, and the bandwidth will not be a stressed constraint to continue annoying users any more.

The options and considerations involved in implementing fiber rings are examined. Ring types and network management are discussed. It is concluded that the implementation of rings will be based on how well they fit into the customer's current and future network. Such factors as network topology, speed of restoral, compliance with standards, and network management will determine the suitable ring architecture that will be deployed.