Multichannel Optical Networks

The huge bandwidth of optical fibre was recognized back in the 1970s during the early development of fibre optics technology. Between 1979 and 1999, the capacity of experimental and deployed systems has been increasing at a rate of 100-fold each decade - a rate exceeding the increase of integrated circuit speeds. Today, optical communication in the public communication networks has developed from the status of a curiosity into being the dominant technology. Various challenges arising from the deployment of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) have attracted effort from many researchers. Indeed, optical networking has been a fertile ground for both theoretical research and experimental studies. This monograph presents contributions from the author's past and ongoing research in the field of optical networking. The ideas presented focus more on graph-theoretical and algorithmic aspects of optical networks.