Digital wrappers for IP over WDM systems

There is considerable interest within the rapidly converging telecommunications and data communications networking environments around a simplification of the data/transport network known as "IP over WDM". The ubiquity and critical role of core IP routers, and the emergence of label switching routers based on multi-protocol label switching technology, when combined with optical transport networks has also raised the issue of optimized network architectures for the Optical Internet. In marketing terms, the notion of "IP over WDM" makes for remarkable hype. What is meant by "IP over WDM", however, is less than clear. The intention of this paper is to demystify the notion of "IP over WDM", and in doing so, to indicate what features may be required in future "collapsed" data/transport networks.