Operation and maintenance for an all-optical transport network

For the enhancement of the existing electrical transport network a new one based on optical frequency division multiplexing (or wavelength division multiplexing) will be added to the existing one. This article focuses on the system/network supervision and operation and maintenance, which are of great importance for the success of the optical transport network. For a better understanding of these topics, it is necessary to derive a layered network model for the optical transport network and to make a workable definition of the term "network transparency." The proposed operation and maintenance concept deals with the identification of its related functions, the supervision of the optical regenerators, the maintenance signals required for failure localization, and the difficulty of defining a suitable mechanism for performance monitoring in transparent networks. Appropriate realization aspects are discussed too. Possible solutions for failure detectors are described. For transferring the individual maintenance signals between the associated network elements, a communication channel with a suitable structure is proposed.