The Impending Optical Network Capacity Crunch

Since the turn of the century, when the Internet traffic became dominant in the communication networks, the average growth rate of the traffic has been about 40%/year, which doubles the traffic every two years, thus multiplying it by a factor of one thousand in twenty years. The main strategy to absorb this unusual growth rate has been bandwidth mining through successive generations of WDM equipment with increasing number of wavelengths, but this approach is nearing exhaustion now. It is estimated that the current traffic growth rate, which remains unabated, will lead to a capacity crunch in the optical fiber networks in the next decade. The paper will discuss the implications of this impending crunch, the strategies that are foreseen to face it, and the research efforts to address the issues and propose solutions.