Optical Signaling and Control:  Opening the Door to New Ways of Building Networks

Michael McLaughlin
President and CEO
Boca Photonics
October 22, 2001

Exploding growth in bandwidth demand being generated by the Internet and e-commerce presents yet another challenge to today’s long-haul telecommunications service providers. They are realizing that their traditional SONET/SDH ring networks cannot efficiently handle the tremendous growth and dynamic nature of optical bandwidth demand and are looking to new technologies that give them the tools to build a more efficient mesh-based optical network.

Optical Mesh Networks Promise Reduced Cost and Increased Revenues

With the emergence of optical switching technology, the stage is set for service providers to deploy optical mesh networks and manage high-capacity optical paths at a fraction of the cost of traditional SONET/SDH ring based networks.  Based on Boca Photonics optical mesh network design analysis, mesh networks can make more efficient use of DWDM capacity resulting in up to 40% savings in capital expenditures.

Integrating and automating key functions of the capacity fulfillment process can also reduce the service providers operating expenses.

Current ring architectures allocate 50% of network capacity for service restoration.  Mesh, on the other hand, allows for equivalent quality of service (QOS) with significant reductions in required capacity for restoration providing more efficient utilization of the network resources (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Ring vs. Mesh Architecture

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