A multiwavelength lightwave platform for transporting broadband signals

Optical networks offer an extremely high traffic bandwidth for digital communications capable of providing communication channels for several hundred nodes, each operating at several Gbit/s. Initially, optical systems were developed mainly as a base platform for transporting high speed digital signals. Such an approach not only improves the simplicity of the network in terms of the network architecture, but also the handling speed. Despite the fact that optical fiber offers high traffic bandwidth, its limitation due to dispersion has made simple optical network inefficient. In addition, optical networks still encounter some of the problems experienced by digital electronic system, such as bottlenecks at switching nodes due to processing delays. Multiwavelength lightpath communications offer a solution to a number of problems presently faced by the optical network system. This paper discusses the implementation of multiwavelength optical networking for broadband communication systems, in particular the Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH). We also present simulation results that compare the performance of the proposed networking scheme with those of a traditional digital network. Our results show a dramatic improvement in the mean packet delay and loss due to a reduction in the number of processing nodes or intermediate nodes for a particular source-destination interconnection