Self-routing WDM high-capacity SONET ring network

Abstract

Interoffice telecommunication traffic has been growing continuously. The traffic volume between central offices (COs) will soon reach 2.488 Gbit/s (SONET OC-48 line rate). The electrooptic processing speed of SONET equipment, therefore, may soon fall behind the aggregate high-speed interoffice traffic as the number of COs increase in a network. To overcome this difficulty, wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) technology offers a possible solution.1 In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a novel network control mechanism for a WDM-SONET ring network which uses acoustooptic tunable filters (AOTFs)2 as WDM-add-drop-multiplexers (WDM- ADMs).