Information Assurance

11.1. Introduction

Optical fiber-based networks have emerged as the predominant transport layer technology for telecom service providers [1–6]. These networks provide very high bit rates to support a broad class of applications. The ability to route large amounts of data and access different channels make them a very appealing option for providing very high-rate access in wide-area networks (WANs), metropolitan area networks (MANs), and even local-area networks (LANs). In particular, if they can be used in an all-optical network (AON) mode where a signal does not have to go through optical-to-electrical-to-optical (O-E-O) conversion, the benefits are larger.

The high capacity of a fiber channel can be efficiently utilized by deploying either ...