Error monitoring for optical metropolitan network services

Service providers rely on performance monitoring capabilities not only to ensure integrity of their network but also to support service-level agreements with their customers. The depth of monitoring is directly tied to the technology and protocol used in the transport layer of the network. Next-generation services based on enterprise-centric, non-SONET/SDH protocols, such as Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel, as well as managed protocol-independent wavelength transport, have created a number of challenges for service providers because of the differences in how error monitoring is performed. In this article we describe and compare protocol-dependent and protocol-independent error monitoring techniques that apply to these service offerings.