Designing Large-Scale ASTN-Based Optical Mesh Networks

Faouzi Kamoun¹ and Mohamed El-Torky²

¹Dubai University College, College of Information Technology, UAE

²Telecommunications Consultants, Province of Quebec, Canada

Abstract: Automatically Switched Transport Network (ASTN) has many capabilities, such as dynamic connection/routing, that make it attractive for traffic engineering and optimization of next generation large scale optical mesh backbones. With increasing traffic demand spanning large geographic areas, optical mesh networks need to grow rapidly in terms of degree of meshing, bandwidth, and number of nodes. This translates (among others) into: (1) an increasing broadcast traffic and message load at each node in the ASTN control plane, especially during links or nodes failures, where dynamic route computation is required. Maintaining the stability of the routing protocol, and preserving service quality (restoration, network-wide delay, etc) as the mesh network grows larger becomes a key requirement, (2) significant memory, bandwidth and processing requirements to maintain and update network topology databases, and (3) additional operational considerations for connections availability, network latency, fault isolation, link maintenance and correlation of failures. This paper addresses the unique operational requirements in this type of large meshed networks environment and provides network designers with practical solutions to address scalability when building large ASTN-based mesh networks.

Keywords: Next-generation networks, intelligent optical networking, automatically switched transport network, network scalability and survivability, optical mesh networks.

Received November 29, 2003; accepted March 6, 2004