New network architectures based on the emerging advanced photonic infrastructure

Communication networks are undergoing a major change. This is due to several factors. On the one hand, the customers demand services based on data transmission enabling interactivity multimedia communication and increasingly also mobility. On the other hand, transmission capacity of optical networks has multiplied over the last few years mainly by the introduction of wavelength division multiplexing. Since the resulting traffic tends to be rather bursty and unpredictable, packet or message transmission and switching is growing much faster than the conventional circuit switching originally devised for voice communication. In fact, Internet, as an alternative to the conventional telephone network, is becoming a basis for providing all sorts of services including standard voice, multimedia, file transfer, etc. In this scenario, traffic flows can fluctuate dramatically, therefore, new network architectures are required that offer not only increased bandwidth but also flexibility and that exploit fully the potential of the emerging advanced photonic infrastructure.