All-optical dense WDM wide-area communication network

This paper describes a high capacity, scalable and modular all-optical dense WDM WAN. The network assumes a ring-tree (tree of rings) topology and employs all-optical packet switching, wavelength reuse, conversion, and routing schemes for data transport. The optical fiber four-wave mixing (FWM) nonlinear phenomenon is used for wavelength conversion, and erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) are used for signal amplification, in the network. The proposed network can be implemented at various scales, from a LAN to a global communication framework. Its transport protocols can be adapted for any dense wavelength-reuse WDM network.