Network Planning for Fast Restoration in General Mesh Optical Networks

Growth in network traffic and optical technology advances are resulting in deployment of pure optical transport networks. These networks consist of network elements such as wavelength add/drop multiplexers and optical cross-connects such as the Lucent LambdaRouter (TM). Elimination of costly optical-to-electrical conversions in these elements is making the resulting optical network cost attractive compared to legacy transport networks based on, for example, SONET/SDH. However, SONET/SDH networks do have a number of capabilities and features required by service providers and it is necessary to provide these in the next-generation optical networks and elements as well. One important feature in SONET/SDH networks is fast network restoration. This is the focus of this paper.