Towards Digital Optical Networks

COST – the acronym for European COoperation in Science and Technology – is the oldest and widest European intergovernmental network for cooperation in - search. Established by the Ministerial Conference in November 1971, COST is presently used by the scientific communities of 35 European countries to coop- ate in common research projects supported by national funds. The funds provided by COST – less than 1% of the total value of the projects – support the COST cooperation networks (COST Actions) through which, with € 30 million per year, more than 30,000 European scientists are involved in - search having a total value which exceeds € 2 billion per year. This is the financial worth of the European added value which COST achieves. A “bottom up approach” (the initiative of launching a COST Action comes from the European scientists themselves), “à la carte participation” (only countries interested in the Action participate), “equality of access” (participation is open also to the scientific communities of countries not belonging to the European - ion) and “flexible structure” (easy implementation and light management of the research initiatives) are the main characteristics of COST.

Optical networks are leaving the labs and becoming a reality. Despite the current crisis of the telecom industry, our everyday life increasingly depends on communication networks for information exchange, medicine, education, data transfer, commerce, and many other endeavours. High capacity links are required by the large futemet traffic demand, and optical networks remain one of the most promising technologies for meeting these needs. WDM systems are today widely deployed, thanks to low-cost at extreme data rates and high reliability of optical components, such as optical amplifiers and fixed/tunable filters and transceivers. Access and metropolitan area networks are increasingly based on optical technologies to overcome the electronic bottleneck at the network edge. Traditional multi-layer architectures, such as the widely deployed IP/ATM/SDH protocol stack, are increasingly based on WDM transport; further efforts are sought to move at the optical layer more of the functionalities available today in higher protocol layers. New components and subsystems for very high speed optical networks offer new design opportunities to network operators and designers. The trends towards dynamically configurable all-optical network infrastructures open up a wide range of new network engineering and design choices, which must face issues such as interoperability and unified control and management.

In these exciting times of quotidianly progressing developments in communication techniques, where more than ever in the history of a technological progress, society's reliance on communication networks for medicine, education, data transfer, commerce, and many other endeavours dominates the human's everyday life, the optical networks are certainly one of the most promising and challenging networking options. Since their commercial arrival in the nineties, they have fundamentally changed the way of dealing with traffic engineering by removing bandwidth bottlenecks and eliminating delays. Today, after the revolutionary bandwidth expansion, the networking functionality migrates more and more to the optical layer, and the need to establish fast wavelength circuits and capacity-on-demand for the higher-layer networks, in particular data networks based on Internet Protocol (IP), has become one of the central networking issues for the new century. The unifying trends toward configurable all-optical network infrastructure open up a wide range of new network engineering and design choices dealing with networks' interoperability and common platforms for control and management. The Fifth Working Conference on Optical Network Design and Modelling, held in the Austrian capital Vienna, February 5-7, 2001, aims at presenting the most recent progress in optical communication techniques, new technologies, standardisation process, emerging markets and carriers. A short look at the Table of Contents of this book tells us, in fact, that this year's conference program reflects the current state of the art precisely.

This second edition of Digital Optical Communications provides a comprehensive treatment of the modern aspects of coherent homodyne and self-coherent reception techniques using algorithms incorporated in digital signal processing (DSP) systems and DSP-based transmitters to overcome several linear and nonlinear transmission impairments and frequency mismatching between the local oscillator and the carrier, as well as clock recovery and cycle slips. These modern transmission systems have emerged as the core technology for Tera-bits per second (bps) and Peta-bps optical Internet for the near future. Featuring extensive updates to all existing chapters, Advanced Digital Optical Communications, Second Edition: Contains new chapters on optical fiber structures and propagation, optical coherent receivers, DSP equalizer algorithms, and high-order spectral DSP receivers Examines theoretical foundations, practical case studies, and MATLAB® and Simulink® models for simulation transmissions Includes new end-of-chapter practice problems and useful appendices to supplement technical information Downloadable content available with qualifying course adoption Advanced Digital Optical Communications, Second Edition supplies a fundamental understanding of digital communication applications in optical communication technologies, emphasizing operation principles versus heavy mathematical analysis. It is an ideal text for aspiring engineers and a valuable professional reference for those involved in optics, telecommunications, electronics, photonics, and digital signal processing.

This book provides a broad overview of IP over WDM technologies, as seen by a group of experts participating in the e-Photon/ONeC and BONE Networks of Excellence funded within the VIth and VIIth Research Framework Programmes (FP6 and FP7) of the European Union. Both Networks of Excellence are aimed at the integration of research teams active on optical networks at a pan-European level, with the creation of virtual centers of excellence in optical networks, te- nologies, and services. The working groups on optical core networks gathered about a 100 researchers from more than 20 universities and research institutions in Europe. The multifaceted viewpoints available in this community on the current state and future evolution of large WDM networking infrastructures are reported in this book. The book is organized in chapters, with chapter editors, listed on pp–, having the responsibility to collect and harmonize contributions by different - search groups. The whole work was made possible by the coordination efforts of Javier Aracil and Franco Callegati, leaders, at the time when the book writing was begun, of the working groups on optical core networks and on optical burst swit- ing in e-Photon/ONeC. We are thankful to them for their efforts. We hope that this manuscript will serve as a valuable reference for students and practitioners in the ?eld of optical networking.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International IFIP-TC6 Conference on Optical Network Design and Modeling, ONDM 2007, held in Athens, Greece, in May 2007. The 41 revised full papers presented together with 14 invited papers address all recent advances in the design, modeling and implementation of optical networks.

Optical networks have been in commercial deployment since the early 1980s as a result of advances in optical, photonic, and material technologies. Although the initial deployment was based on silica ?ber with a single wavelength modulated at low data rates, it was quickly demonstrated that ?ber can deliver much more bandwidth than any other transmission medium, twisted pair wire, coaxial cable, or wireless. Since then, the optical network evolved to include more exciting technologies, gratings, optical ?lters, optical multiplexers, and optical ampli?ers so that today a single ?ber can transport an unprecedented aggregate data rate that exceeds Tbps, and this is not the upper limit yet. Thus, the ?ber optic network has been the network of choice, and it is expected to remain so for many generationsto come, for both synchronousand asynchronouspayloads; voice, data, video, interactive video, games, music, text, and more. In the last few years, we have also witnessed an increase in network attacks as a result of store andforwardcomputer-basednodes. These attackshave manymaliciousobjectives:harvestsomeone else’s data, impersonate another user, cause denial of service, destroy ?les, and more. As a result, a new ?eld in communicationis becomingimportant,communicationnetworksand informationse- rity. In fact, the network architect and system designer is currently challenged to include enhanced features such as intruder detection, service restoration and countermeasures, intruder avoidance, and so on. In all, the next generation optical network is intelligent and able to detect and outsmart malicious intruders.