With
the Internet protocol, voice and video as well as real-time multimedia traffic could be integrated
and transmitted with the data traffic over a single network infrastructure, providing
unprecedented opportunity for businesses to improve their services, reduce expenses, and
increase their revenues. With the technological evolution, IP diminished the boundaries
between the computing, entertainment, and the telecom industries, which led to more customer
centric business models. Being an intermediate layer between an immense variety of
IP-based services and almost all the layer-2 technologies, IP is more than a revenue-generating
integration layer. IP convergence is not merely an option; it is inevitably becoming
a business necessity in the Internet-dependent era and the new customer-centric economy.
Such convergence is best supported by the WDM technology. WDM, which is conceptually
similar to Frequency Division Multiplexing (FDM), is a method of transmitting many
light beams of different wavelengths simultaneously down the core of a single optical fiber.
Therefore, with WDM the available bandwidth can be increased without deploying additional
optical fibers. Furthermore, WDM relieves the effect of electronic bottleneck by dividing
the optical transmission spectrum into a number of non-overlapping channels; thus, the
electronic components would only work at their own speed (few gigabits per second) and
not at the aggregated transmission rate.
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