Design of an optical pan-European transport network based on hierarchical rings

This paper describes work currently being undertaken as part of the ACTS OPEN Project. ACTS (Advanced Communications Technologies and Services) is the European Commission´s major programme for supporting pre-competitive research and technological development in telecommunications and associated services. The paper first introduces the OPEN (optical pan-European network) project. It then describes the simulations carried out, and gives illustrative results with some concluding comments