OPTICAL INTERNET

    Gaurang Chandrakant, Meng-Hua Wei, Ihsan Ulas Kocaoglu

• Identification of the Technology
• Recent applications and Major Players /Users
• Explanation and profile of the technology
• Assessment of limitations and potential
• Brief history of the evolution of the technology
• Future development and expectations
• References

Just as civil engineers do not expect excellent secondary country roads to handle interstate highway traffic volumes - and, hence, do not design them as such; the initial brilliant pioneering electrical engineers never designed the internet to handle the immense volume which flows over the network today. Today’s Internet has two primary limitations: Speed and Reliability. 2.5 billion hours of wasted time waiting for web pages to download is indicative that the reliability is not even close to today’s telecommunications network. The cost of staying connected continuously to provide this sort of reliability still remains prohibitive. These challenges of access link speed and current Internet reliability must be met head on and dealt with - and done in such a way as to facilitate affordability.
The Optical Internet brings together fiber optics systems, the Internet, and high-speed access in the first mile of the network (the segment between the home or small business, and the first switching point) transmitting high-speed data over hybrid fiber. It's the Web at the speed of light. Providing voice, data, video, and the future “killer applications” to be carried efficiently and economically!

Today’s Internet highway is made up of fundamentally two components  - an access and transport layer.  The net today has a static, high-speed optical backbone … but today’s highway has a single lane road for an on-ramp. This analogy when applied to the internet, illustrates a severe limitation to the creation and acceptance of, advanced, revenue generating applications such as unrestricted telecommuting and quality multi-media for entertainment and e-commerce.
Given that the internet has grown over 10,000% over the past 12 months alone without these applications gives us some idea of how much they will grow in the future.
Even with that 56K on ramp, Internet traffic is doubling every 4 months, or by a factor of 8 every year.  The continuation of this growth for three years will result in cumulative traffic equal to over 500 times what it is today.  Now if one compounds that by a factor of just 20--given an increase in the access link to a single megabit--Internet traffic growth becomes 10,000 times its current level.
The Optical Internet brings together fiber optics systems, the Internet, and high-speed access in the first mile of the network (the segment between the home or small business, and the first switching point). This relies on upgrading of technologies at two layers: Transport as well as Access layer. The routers of tomorrow will be Terabit routers, processing speeds that we can only dream about today, allowing quality of service & management. These routers will do 10 Gbps Packet Processing - using interfaces which rapidly store and forward at optical speeds

Optical Internet is opening of the edge through multiple technologies.  New vision of access in the future is highly flexible megabit and gigabit high speed access to every desk, phone, and personal computing device. Together with solving the access issue Optical Internet will utilize10 Gbps optics, Terabit routing and smart Dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) to transform today’s static highway to tomorrow’s intelligent, re-configurable optical highway.
 
 

In order to accommodate the massive bandwidth required for the optical highway, a highly intelligent and flexible transport infrastructure must be built.  A serious limitation of this network would be that the maximum speed of the network would be the speed of the slowest segment of the connection. The upgrade to the Optical Internet would have to be total, across board, in order to make it totally reliable and scalable.

Exceptional reliability of today’s voice network must be transferred to the IP layer to provide optical reliability. Reliability that people have come to expect from a public voice network, which is basically switches, which use as their connection and transport mechanism a SONET/SDH and DWDM core.

This network has to be flexible enough to allow voice, data, video, and the future “killer applications” to be carried efficiently and economically over a converged network - a network that exhibits optical convergence.

While the transport capacity is increasing exponentially, at a rate far greater than the Moore’s Law, the cost per Gigabit-mile is dropping sharply pushing savings to the end users.
 
 

In 1962, Rand Paul Baran, of the RAND Corporation (a government agency), was commissioned by the U.S. Air Force to do a study on how it could maintain its command and control over its missiles and bombers, after a nuclear attack. Baran's finished document described several ways to accomplish this. His final proposal was a packet switched network.
By 1968 ARPA awarded the ARPANET contract to BBN. BBN had selected a Honeywell minicomputer as the base on which they would build the switch. The physical network was constructed in 1969, linking four nodes: University of California at Los Angeles, SRI (in Stanford), University of California at Santa Barbara, and University of Utah. The network was wired together via 50 Kbps circuits. Backbones: 50Kbps ARPANET - Hosts: 4
By 1972 the first e-mail program was created by Ray Tomlinson of BBN. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was renamed The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Backbones: 50Kbps ARPANET - Hosts: 23
In 1984 the ARPANET was divided into two networks: MILNET and ARPANET. MILNET was to serve the needs of the military and ARPANET was to support the advanced research component; Department of Defense continued to support both networks. Upgrade to CSNET was contracted to MCI. New circuits would be T1 lines,1.5 Mbps which is twenty-five times faster than the old 56 Kbps lines. IBM would provide advanced routers and Merit would manage the network. New network was to be called NSFNET (National Science Foundation Network), and old lines were to remain called CSNET. Backbones: 50Kbps ARPANET, 56Kbps CSNET, plus satellite and radio connections - Hosts: 1024
In 1988 soon after the completion of the T1 NSFNET backbone, traffic increased so quickly that plans immediately began on upgrading the network again. Merit and its partners formed a 'not for profit' corporation called ANS, Advanced Network Systems, which was to conduct research into high speed networking. It soon came up with the concept of the T3, a 45 Mbps line. NSF quickly adopted the new network and by the end of 1991 all of its sites were connected by this new backbone. Backbones: 50Kbps ARPANET, 56Kbps CSNET, 1.544Mbps (T1) NSFNET, plus satellite and radio connections - Hosts: 56,000
In 1990 while the T3 lines were being constructed, the Department of Defense disbanded the ARPANET and it was replaced by the NSFNET backbone. The original 50Kbs lines of ARPANET were taken out of service. Backbones: 56Kbps CSNET, 1.544Mbps (T1) NSFNET, plus satellite and radio connections - Hosts: 313,000
In 1991 CSNET (which consisted of 56Kbps lines) was discontinued having fulfilled its important early role in the provision of academic networking service. A key feature of CREN is that its operational costs are fully met through dues paid by its member organizations. The NSF established a new network, named NREN, the National Research and Education Network. The purpose of this network is to conduct high speed networking research. It was not to be used as a commercial network, nor was it to be used to send a lot of the data that the Internet now transfers. Backbones: Partial 45Mbps (T3) NSFNET, a few private backbones, plus satellite and radio connections - Hosts: 617,000
In 1992 Internet Society is chartered. World-Wide Web released by CERN. NSFNET backbone upgraded to T3 (44.736Mbps) Backbones: 45Mbps (T3) NSFNET, private interconnected backbones consisting mainly of 56Kbps, 1.544Mbps, plus satellite and radio connections - Hosts: 1,136,000
In 1994 no major changes were made to the physical network. The most significant thing that happened was the growth. Many new networks were added to the NSF backbone. Hundreds of thousands of new hosts were added to the INTERNET during this time period. ATM (Asynchronous Transmission Mode, 145Mbps) backbone is installed on NSFNET. Backbones: 145Mbps (ATM) NSFNET, private interconnected backbones consisting mainly of 56Kbps, 1.544Mbps, and 45Mpbs lines, plus satellite and radio connections - Hosts: 3,864,000
From 1996-DATE Most Internet traffic is carried by backbones of independent ISPs, including MCI, AT&T, Sprint, UUnet, BBN planet, ANS, and more. Currently the Internet Society, the group that controls the INTERNET, is trying to figure out new TCP/IP to be able to have billions of addresses, rather than the limited system of today. The problem that has arisen is that it is not known how both the old and the new addressing systems will be able to work at the same time during a transition period. Backbones: 145Mbps (ATM) NSFNET (now private), private interconnected backbones consisting mainly of 56Kbps, 1.544Mbps, 45Mpbs, and 155Mpbs lines, plus satellite and radio connections - Hosts: over 15,000,000, and growing rapidly

Over the last 2 decades, growth in processing power coupled with network connectivity already has resulted in great economic benefits. INFLATION is dead.  INNOVATION is at an all-time high.
Optical Internet will accelerate this momentum. We will see fiber optics going to the last mile and each home/office will be connected to the optical internet. There are enormous possibilities with the Web growing at a phenomenal rate, enabling
Global supply chains
Global telecommuting
Global economies
Global financial markets
Visual communications and
Availability of the best education to billions of people in the world
...multiplying innovation.
And its impact on NEXT GENERATION work force -  they don’t know how to live without WEB.  They will demand PERFORMANCE.  They will demand OPTICAL INTERNET.
Optical Internet will provide a wide spectrum of new services and applications which will dramatically change our lives. In fact, like the steam engine, electricity and the microchip before it..., the Optical Internet will be the economic engine of the future.

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Way/5970/sonet.html
http://www.sff.net/people/Jeff.Hecht/history.html
http://www.davesite.com/webstation/net-history.shtml