Study of a transparent and reconfigurable metropolitan area network

The transport performance of an optically transparent metro-size ring network of 280 km circumference, at 2.5 Gbps, based on optimized optical layer components and fiber is demonstrated. Nodes based on a variety of technological approaches are used. This size was chosen based on recent studies that have shown that this is the typical maximum connection length in metro networks. The Q-factor of the received signal, for the worst case path, was higher than 10 dB for all the channels. In particular, we show that the dynamic add/drop functionality in the network does not affect the system performance when gain controlled amplifiers are used.