Photonic networking in the Internet era

Due to exponential growth of traffic generated mainly by services utilising the Internet platform, photonic technologies are being increasingly used not only for transmission but are also making their way into network nodes to implement routing and switching. First photonic networking elements have appeared on the market enabling circuit switching while optical packet and burst switching are still hot research subjects. In this paper progress in introducing photonic technologies in communication networks is reviewed and development trends in this area are discussed.