Advances in photonic devices and circuits will likely move fiber optic networks toward higher degrees of interconnectivity and transparency.

Restoration in Fiber Optic Mesh Networks

As these networks evolve from a point-to-point communications toward mesh topologies, new capacity provisioning and restoration schemes need to be developed. Analysis of these requirements and protocols is typically performed by computer simulation, which is slow for large networks (thus limiting the number of variants which can be tested) and provides no general guidelines for optimization of network performance parameters. Our approach has been to derive analytic relations between quantifiable network parameters, such as restoration time versus network capacity expenditure for several mesh restoration schemes. This analytic description, combined with the network global expectation model (NetGEM) developed by S. K. Korotky of Bell Labs, allows for the quick evaluation of the capacity expenditure for a wide range of mesh topologies utilizing these restoration schemes.