Optical Transport Network Design

Modern carrier networks must deliver reliable communications services that are secure and match the growing speed and capacity demanded by their customers. While during the 20th Century we saw the growth in universal voice and the early use of Internet services, the 21st Century network demand has been shaped by the inexorable growth in multimedia, social media and mobile services. Carrier Transport Networks must match the current demands with the right technologies delivered flexibly enough to adapt to the ever changing pattern of user demand. They must also be delivering service to the right place and at the right price.

This course is aimed at designers, and those that want to be aware of the key sills of design, within the context of building new Transport Networks for tomorrow’s carrier services. While this is mainly concerned with long distance, high bandwidth core services, it is important to be aware of where and how the services will eventually be delivered. In the 1990s there was a massive grown in SDH and ATM technology within Transport Networks. However by the end of the 1990s it was realised that ATM was an expensive mistake as Switched Optical Ethernet offered a more powerful and cheaper solution. Also that SDH, optimised for voice services, was probably not the optimal solution either.

This course examines the demands which we are likely to place on our next generation of Transport Networks, identifies the options currently available for delivering reliability, security, aggregation flexibility, routing, switching and management. It then provides an approach to designing networks using standardised metrics to deliver services matching current and predicted future demand profiles. In-class exercises will uncover the key statistical techniques for estimating and prediction of future demand and confidence intervals. Using simple spread sheets and modelling students will learn from practical exercises how to design services to match their particular carrier network needs.

These techniques will then be applied to consider the design of carrier networks using Optical Transport technologies.

Network designers, Project Managers, Infrastructure design professionals, Service and system engineers wishing to appreciate the design of services.