The Case for Opaque Multiwavelength Optical Networks

Wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) now seems certain to play a leading role in public telecommunications networks of the future. What is unclear, however, is whether these WDM networks will be "transparent," i.e., whether their signals will travel from source to destination through a sequence of intervening nodes with little or no optoelectronic conversion along the way. In this work we consider "opaque" WDM networks, in which network elements include optoelectronic conversion and signal regeneration along the path, thus preventing accumulation of impairments.