chapter 6

Client Layers of the Optical Layer

THIS CHAPTER DESCRIBES several networks that use optical fiber as their underlying transmission mechanism. These networks can be thought of as client layers of the optical layer. As we saw in Chapter 1, the optical layer provides lightpaths to the client layers, where the lightpaths are the physical links between client layer network elements. All the client layers that we will study process the data in the electrical domain, performing functions such as fixed time division multiplexing or statistical time division multiplexing (packet switching). They aggregate and bring a variety of lower-speed voice, data, and private line services into the network. Each of these client networks is important in ...

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