A transparent, all-optical, metropolitan network experiment in a field environment: the “PROMETEO” self-healing ring

In this paper, we present an optical network demonstrator realizing a wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) metropolitan self-healing ring. The network integrate three optical add-drop multiplexer (OADM) nodes, designed by two manufacturing companies adopting different architectures and technological solution. It is so demonstrated that transversal compatibility among optical network entities produced by different companies is possible at the state of the art of the technology. A complete transmission performance characterization of the network has been carried out demonstrating that, in nominal operating conditions and on the most critical path, the error probability is lower that 10^-14. The reconfiguration times in case of failure has been measured too, demonstrating that this network architecture provide fast self-healing mechanism, in line with the requirements of ITU-T recommendations for very high capacity networks