DWDM Network Designs and Engineering Solutions

Chapter 4. WDM Network Design -1

Introduction to Optical Design

A network planner needs to optimize the various electrical and optical parameters to ensure smooth operations of a wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) network. Whether the network topology is that of a point-to-point link, a ring, or a mesh, system design inherently can be considered to be of two separate parts: optical system design and electrical or higher-layer system design. To the networking world, the optical layer (WDM layer) appears as a barren physical layer whose function is to transport raw bits at a high bit rate with negligible loss. Most conventional network layer planners do not care about the heuristics of the optical layer.

However, such lapses can often be catastrophic. ...