Routing in Translucent Networks - Motivations and Objectives of EURESCOM P1202 Project

The recent availability of new optical network elements makes possible to introduce new architectures and new functionality into the optical transport networks. Optical crossconnects and ultra long haul transmission equipment have emerged and opened a new opportunity to handle fully transparent connections and extend optically transparent domains. A translucent network is basically a network in which the network functions (transmission, routing, supervision, performance assessment, and survivability) are mainly performed in the optical domain. However, the use of opto-electronic components (e.g. components providing functions like wavelength conversion and 3R regeneration) to improve the performance of the translucent networks is not precluded. The current paper briefly introduces EURESCOM P1202 Project “Routing in Translucent Networks”, and presents some illustrative results on the resource utilization aspects of transparency in optical networks.