Future trends in the design of survivable optical networks

Due to the exponentially increasing amount of bandwidth carried in a single fiber and the emergence of versatile multimedia applications for delay-sensitive commercial purposes with stringent quality of service requirements, the occurrence of a network failure (e.g. fiber cut) may cause serious and even fatal impairment on the service integrity to innumerable end users. Therefore, network survivability and service continuity have become the most important issues for optical networks. In this presentation we will address many issues related to protection and restoration in optical wavelength routed WDM networks and provide some future trends in designing survivable optical networks.