With all of the new broadband technologies being exploited to connect Consumers, Businesses and Governments up to the Internet there has been an enormous increase in the traffic in the Metro and Backbone. The Backbone of the networks seems to be getting quite a bit of attention from advances in Photonic Integration, i.e. Infinera, Granular Switching, i.e. Ciena’s 4200 Platform and a number of Photonic Switch vendors.
The Metro has had it’s share of new advances and one of them Optical Burst Switching has been around for a few years, is a maturing technology and looks to be a game-changer. There are currently two companies, that I know of, working on this technology; Matisse Networks of Mountain View, CA and InTune of Dublin, Ireland. So far only Matisse Networks has a product on the market.
The main idea behind Optical Burst Switching is to have a DWDM Metro Network that activates Lambdas automatically according to Ethernet/IP demands in the network. This is a stark contrast to existing DWDM/CWDM/SONET/SDH networks that “nail up” a circuit and remain active even if there is no traffic flowing over it.
From what I can see the Optical Burst Switching offers a number of advantages for Metro-Ethernet providers, not the least of which being; Automated Ethernet Provisioning, Efficient use of Lambda Resources, SDH/SONET like uptime and resiliency and, most importantly, a tight coupling between the Service Layer (Ethernet) and the Transport Layer (DWDM).
As Said before, Optical Burst Switching has been around for a few years and now the Metro Networks are seeing the demand for high bandwidth services steer Carriers to look at the technology to meet this explosive growth in Metro Bandwidth.
