First, we set the stage by providing a brief historical overview of the beginnings of optical networks and the major achievements over the past fewdecades, thereby highlighting key enabling technologies and techniques that paved the way to current state-of-the-art optical networks. Next, we elaborate on the big picture of future optical networks and identify the major steps toward next-generation optical networks. The major contribution of this book is an up-to-date overview of the latest and most important developments in the area of optical wide, metropolitan, access, and local area networks.

We pay particular attention to recently standardized and emerging high-performance switching paradigms designed for the cost-effective and bandwidth-efficient support of a variety of both legacy and new applications and services at all optical network hierarchy levels. In addition, we explain recently standardized Ethernet-based optical metro, access, and local area networks in great detail and report ongoing research on their performance enhancements.

After describing the concepts and underlying techniques of the various optical switching paradigms at length, we take a comprehensive look at current testbed activities carried out around the world to better understand the implementation complexity associated with each of the described optical switching techniques, as well as to get an idea of what future optical switching networks are expected to look like. Finally, we include a chapter on the important topic of converging optical (wired) networks with their wireless counterparts.

This book was written to be used for teaching graduate students as well as to provide.

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