The Building Blocks of a Data-Aware Transport Network: Deploying Viable Ethernet and Virtual Wire Services via Multi-Service ADMS

SONET/SDH technologies constitute the core transport infrastructure of major telecom service providers worldwide. As the percentage of packet-oriented traffic in the overall traffic demand continues to rise, prompted by the wide-spread adoption of the Internet Protocol suite, and recently by the fast adoption of Ethernet services, there is an increasing pressure to improve the service provider's transport infrastructure in ways that make it data-aware and cost-effective to packet-oriented applications. Steps in this direction include the adoption of native physical interfaces, for Ethernet and storage Area Networks (SANs) as service interfaces, or full integration of packet switching capabilities with resilient Packet Ring (RPR) and Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) technologies. This paper discusses the emerging building blocks for next-generation data-aware transport networks and next-generation transport network elements.