Design, transport performance study and engineering of a 11 Tb/s US mesh metro network

A new top-down simulation methodology for successfully enabling transparent optical networks in the metro environment is presented. A 11 Tb/s ILEC network was engineered based on projected traffic demands for a typical medium size US metropolitan area. The approach combines traffic modeling, network dimensioning, and transport layer performance modeling. The latter is further composed of three main simulation steps: efficient wavelength-domain simulations for network crosstalk analysis, time-domain simulation for determining Q-penalties for pulse propagation effects and finally a Q-budgeting approach that combines the above results for flexible network design and engineering. As a result metro players like ILECs or CLECs can effectively and quickly engineer transparent networks in the metro environment using simulation methodologies like the above. Details on the actual traffic and transport layer models used as well as experimental validation results for the models will be presented in more detail at the conference.