Migrating from Fixed Grid to Flexible Grid Optical Networks

The Internet backbone infrastructure has to regularly evolve to keep pace with the changing requirements of its users. Next-generation backbone networks will have to support reconfigurable optical channels working at multiple terabit per second to accommodate the growing number of users and their increasing bandwidth requests, as well as be able to adapt to support new and unanticipated services. For more than two decades, optical networks based on wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) have met the bandwidth needs of the Internet, by scaling up their bandwidth by two to three orders of magnitude.