UNIT-V

OPTICAL NETWORKS

SONET/SDH:

Synchronous optical networking (SONET) or synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) is a

standardized protocol that transfers multiple digital bit streams over optical fibre using lasers or
highly coherent light emitting diodes. At low transmission rates data can also be transferred via
an electrical interface.

▪ SONET (Synchronous Optical Network) is a proposal by Bell core (Bell Communications

Research); SONET is a technique of transport between two nodes, which defines the interface
adopted for the NNI (Network Node Interface).
▪ SONET specifies the rates, formats and parameters of all physical transmission media.

Some of the benefits of SONET/SDH given below:

Multiplexing simplification:
● In asynchronous multiplexing, each terminal in the network runs its own clock, and while
we can specify a nominal clock rate for the signal, there can be significant differences in
the actual rates between different clocks.
Management:
● The SONET and SDH standards incorporate extensive management information for
managing the network, including extensive performance monitoring, identification of
connectivity and traffic type, identification and reporting of failures, and a data
communication channel for transporting management information between the nodes.
Interoperability:
● Although PDH defined multiplexing methods, it did not define a standard format on the
transmission link. Thus different vendors used different line coding, optical interfaces,
and so forth to optimize their products, which made it very difficult to connect one
vendor’s equipment to another’s via a transmission link. SONET and SDH avoid this
problem by defining standard optical interfaces that enable interoperability between
equipment from different vendors on the link.

Network availability:

1
 ● The SONET and SDH standards have evolved to incorporate specific network topologies
and specific protection techniques and associated protocols to provide high-availability
services.
SONET / SDH Layers
The SONET layer consists of four sub layers-the path, line, section, and physical layers.
The below figure shows the top three layers. Each layer, except for the physical layer, has a set
of associated overhead bytes that are used for several purposes.

SONET/SDH layers showing terminations of the path, line, and section Layers for a sample connection passing through terminal multiplexers
(TMs) and add/drop multiplexers (ADMs). The physical layer is not shown.

Physical layer:
▪ The SONET standard specifies such physical media as optical fiber and light sources
with operating wavelengths that depends on the bit rates and distance for which
theSONET network id designed.
▪ SONET systems are sub-divided into three networks:
❖ Short reach networks(SR)
❖ Intermediate reach networks(IR)
❖ Long reach networks(LR)
▪ For short reach network, SONET recommended 1310nm operating wavelength LED and
multimode fiber.
▪ For long reach network, SONET recommended 1550nm operating wavelength DFB laser
diode and single mode fiber physical layer is needed as each node.
Section layer:
▪ It is responsible for sending data to the physical layer.
▪ It interfaces with the physical layer by adding appropriate bytes to the frame overhead.

2
 ▪ It also provides error monitoring and control.
▪ It regenerates the signal and protects the multiplexing and switching operations.
▪ Section layer is needed at each regenerator.
Line layer:
▪ It is responsible for multiplexing many path layer connections onto a single link between
adjacent nodes.
▪ This layer also provides most of the operating, administrative management and
provisioning (OAM& P) functions, including network protections.
▪ A line layer needed at ADMS and TMS.
Path layer:
▪ It is an end to end layer.
▪ It is responsible for connections between a source and destination.
▪ It accepts data from line layer adds routing and error control information.
▪ It also monitors and tracks the status of connection.
▪ A path layer is needed at each SONET terminal multiplexer.

SONET Frame Structure

Figure shows the structure of an STS-1 frame. A frame is 125 μs in duration (which
corresponds to a rate of 8000 frames/s), regardless of the bit rate of the SONET signal. This time
is set by the 8 kHz sampling rate of a voice circuit.
90 columns

3 columns 87 columns

Transport Path
overhead
overhead payload

9 rows
Synchronous payload envelope (SPE)
Structure of STS-1 format

An STS frame consists of 9 rows and 90 columns of 8-bit bytes for a total of 810 bytes
(6480 bits).The duration of each frame is 125µs.Even though SONET is called an optical

3
network, it can support traditional electrical transmission. The electrical signal in SONET is
called Synchronous Transport Signal (STS).STS level 1, designated as STS-1 transmits at 51.84
Mbits/sec. All other levels are multiples of STS-1 as shown in the following table.
Electrical signal Optical signal Bit rate

STS-1 OC-1 51.84

STS-3 OC-3 155.52

STS-9 OC-9 466.56

STS-12 OC-12 633.08

STS-18 OC-18 933.12

STS-24 OC-24 1244.16

STS-48 OC-48 2488.32

Section Overhead
The two bytes in Framing (A1/A2) are used for delineating the frame and are set to
Prespecified values in each STS-1 within an STS-N. Network elements use these bytes to
determine the start of a new frame.
Path overhead:
It provides end to end communication99 bytes length column wise only).It is inserted to user
data or payload by the end transmitter. It remains attached until the data reaches the end
receiver. It monitors end equipment, status, signal labeling and a user channel.
Transport overhead
It provides communication between STS-N multiplexer and adjacent nodes such as
regenerators (i.e.,) it carries network management function.
Elements of SONET/SDH Infrastructure:
SONET uses terminal multiplexers(TM), add-drop multiplexer (ADM),digital cross
connects(DCS) and generators.
STS OC-1
Mapping and Electrical to
overhead Scrambling optical
insertion 4
DS-3
51.840Mbits
44.736Mbits/s 51.480Mbits
Conversion of Digital Signal to Optical Signal (Oc)

Terminal multiplexer: Low speed links connected to SONET through terminal multiplexers. It
is also called line terminating equipment(LTE).If a TM is connected to digital cross connect, we
have a point to point link.
Add drop multiplexer: It is used to pick out one or more low speed streams from a high speed
streams and add one or more low speed streams to high speed streams.
Digital cross connect: It is used to manage all the transmission facilities in the central office. It
is actually a digital switch. It also monitors network performance and do multiplexing.
Regenerators: It is used to boost a signal for long distance transmission

WAVELENGTH DIVISION MULTIPLEXING (WDM)

WDM is a method of sending many light beams of different wavelengths simultaneously down
the core of an optical fiber.WDM is conceptually similar to frequency division multiplexing
(FDM) in which multiple information signals can modulate optical signals at different wave
length.
The optical fiber has extremely about 25 THz [terahertz), in the 1.55 low-attenuation band and
this is 1,000 times the total bandwidth of radio on the planet earth.
A few gigabits per second are achieved because the rate at which an end user can access the
network is limited by electronic speed, which is a few gigabits per second.
It’s extremely difficult to exploit all of the huge bandwidth of a single fiber using a single high
capacity channel due to optical-electronic bandwidth mismatch or "electronic bottleneck."
The erbium-doped fiber amp amplifies signals at many different wavelengths simultaneously
“regardless of their modulation scheme or speed”. WDM figure shows below:

5
A WDM optical system using a diffraction grating is completely passive, unlike electrical FDM,
and thus is highly reliable. Within each WDM channel, it is possible to have FDM where the
channel bandwidth is subdivided into many radio frequency channels each at different frequency.
This called sub carrier multiplexing.
The attraction of WDM is that a huge increase in available bandwidth can be obtained without
the huge investment necessary to deploy additional optical fiber.
Stimulated Brillouin scattering is caused between the optical signal and acoustic waves in the
fiber. This interaction can make the power from the optical signal be scattered back toward the
transmitter.
Self: phase modulation is caused by variations in the power of an optical signal and results in
variations in the phase of the signal.
Four-wave mixing occurs when two or more optical signals (wavelengths) mix in such a way
that they produce new optical frequencies called sidebands.
The advent of EDFA enabled commercial development of WDM systems by providing a way to
amplify all the wavelengths at the same time.

6
 (a) EDFA (b) EDFA Gain profile

There are three types of signal regenerators they are:

● The 3R regenerator (a regenerator executing reshaping an relocking operations; reshaping
of the signal reproduces the original pulse shape of each bit, eliminating much Of the
noise, and synchronizes the signal to its original bit timing pattern and bit rate).
● The 2R regenerator (a regenerator executing only the reshaping operations)
● The 1R regenerator (a regenerator without reshaping and retiming operations carrying out
simple EDFAs or other' amplifiers).
● A network element which combines an optical receiver, some degree of regeneration and
an optical transmitter is called a transponder.
WDM OPTICAL NETWORK ARCHITECTURES:
There are three classes of WDN optical network architectures:
o Broadcast and select Networks
o Wavelength Routed Networks

Broadcast-and-Select Networks

7
▪ A broadcast-and-select network consists of a passive star coupler connecting the nodes in
the network.
▪ Each node is equipped with one or more fixed-tuned or tunable optical transmitters and
one or more fixed-tuned or tunable optical receivers.
▪ Different nodes transmit messages on different wavelengths simultaneously. The star
coupler combines all these messages and then broadcasts the combined message to all the
nodes.
▪ A node selects a desired wavelength to receive the desired message by tuning its receiver
to that wavelength.

8
An N x Nstar coupler can be realized using a multistage interconnection which as network which
has log2N stages of 2 x 2 couplers per stage.
The single-hop broadcast-and-select networks a message once transmitted as light reaches its
final destination directly without being converted to electronic form in between.

Broadcast-and-select Network Demonstrators:

In this demonstrator’s transmission at 1.5 Gb/s per wavelength over 57 km was given.
RAINBOW-I and RAINBOW-II were design to support 32 wavelengths by 1 nm, in a star
configuration.
RAINBOW-I interconnected computers after a connection was setup transmission at 300 Mb/s
on each wavelength was possible.
RAINBOW-II is an extension of RAINBOW-I, the transmission rate was upgraded to 1 Gb/s.

9
Wavelength Routed Networks
Wavelength routed WDM networks have the potential to avoid the three problems lack of
wavelength reuse, power splitting loss, and scalability to wide area networks(WANs) of
broadcast-and-select networks.
In a wavelength routed network, a message is sent from one node to another node using a
wavelength continuous route called a light path, without any optical electronic optical conversion
and buffering at the intermediate nodes. This process is known as wavelength routing.
A light path is an all-optical communication path between two nodes established by
allocating the same wavelength throughout the route of the transmitted data.

(a)Wavelength routed network (b) Logical Topology

Wavelength reuse is an important feature that refers to simultaneous transmission of
messages on the same wavelength over fiber-link-disjoint light paths.
The wavelength routed networks makes them more scalable than broadcast-and-select
networks. Another important characteristic which enables wavelength routed networks to span

10
long distances is that the transmitted power invested in the light path is not split to irrelevant
destinations.

Equipment Switch
WDN backbone Network

The Optical layer provides client independent or protocol transparent circuit-switched

service to a variety of clients that constitute the client layer.

Layers in WDM Network

11
Wavelength Routed Network Demonstrators
One of the most comprehensive field deployment trials in the Defense Advanced
Projects Agency (DARPA)-sponsored multi wavelength optical network.

It is a wavelength routed test bed that uses 8 wavelengths spaced 200 GHz apart, with a
data transmission rate of 2.5 GB/s per wavelength.

The field trial consists of a local ring network with several WADMs in it and a WXC to
interconnect the local ring network to a long-distance network.

Passive Optical Network (PON)

⮚ PON use some form of passive components such as optical star coupler or static wavelength
router as the remote node.
⮚ Simple PON architecture uses a separate fiber pair from the CO to each ONU. The main problem
with this approach is that cost of CO equipment scales with the number of ONU’s.
⮚ Moreover, the operator needs to install and maintain all these fiber pairs. This type of architecture
used to provide high speed service.
⮚ Instead of providing a fiber pair to each ONU, a single fiber can be used with bidirectional
transmission. However the same wavelength cannot be used to transmit data simultaneously in
both the directions because of the uncontrolled reflection in the fiber. One way is to use time
division multiplexing so that both the ends does not transmit simultaneously. Another is to use
different wavelength (1.3 and 1.55µm,for example)for the different directions.
⮚ In PON architecture, fiber pair can also share by many users. Common example for such network
is SONET/SDH rings. This type of network provides high speed services to large business
customers. An ONU is a SONET add drop multiplexer(ADM),which can drop its information at
particular wavelength.

PON architecture types:

⮚ T PON-Passive Optical Network for Telephony.
⮚ W PON-Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) Passive Optical Network.
⮚ WR PON-Wavelength Routing Passive Optical Network.

Disadvantages of PON:
⮚ The cost of CO equipment scales with number of ONU’s.
⮚ Operator needs to install and maintain all the pair of fibers coming from each ONU’s to CO.

Advantages of PON:
⮚ Since this architecture is made from passive components, its reliability is very high.
⮚ Ease of maintenance.
⮚ Fiber infra-structure itself is transparent to bitrate modulation formats and the overall network can
be upgraded in the future without changing the infra-structure itself.

12
 a. Passive Optical Network for Telephony(TPON):
⮚ The CO broadcasts its signal downstream to all the ONU’s using a passive star coupler. The ONU
shares an upstream channel in a time multiplexed fashion. In this case, upstream and downstream
signals are carried using different wavelength over a single fiber.
⮚ In TDM approach, the ONU’s need to be synchronized to a common clock. This is done by a
process called ‘RANGING’, where each ONU measures its delay from CO and adjusts its clock
such that all the ONU’s are synchronized relative to the CO.
⮚ The CO transmitted can be LED or fabrypenot laser and receiver is PIN FET receiver. ONU’s
transmitter and receiver can also be LED or laser and PIN FET receiver.
⮚ Number of ONU’s is limited by splitting loss in the star coupler.
⮚ There is a tradeoff between transmitted power, receiver sensitivity, bit rate and the number of
ONU’s and total distance covered.
⮚ TPON’s may be cost effective at offering low speed services compared to SONET/SDH rings or
Ethernet based offerings.

b. WDM PON:

⮚ It is an upgraded version of the basic PON architecture. In this case, the CO broadcasts multiple
wavelengths to all the ONU’s and each ONU select a particular wavelength.
⮚ In this case, a single transceiver at the CO with WDM array of transmitters or single tunable
transmitter to yield (WDM PON).
⮚ This approach allows each ONU’s to have electronics running only at the rate it receives data,
and not at the aggregate bit rate.
⮚ However it is still limited by the power splitting at the star coupler.

c. WR PON- Wavelength routing PON:

⮚ In this case, a passive arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) is used to route different wavelength to
different ONUS in the downstream directions, without is curring a splitting loss.
⮚ AS in the TPON and WPON architectures, the ONUS time shared wavelength for upstream
transmission
⮚ It allows point to point dedicated services to be provided to ONUS.

FTTH: Fiber to the home

⮚ IN FTTC i.e. Fiber to the curb (or) Fiber to the building, data is transmitted digitally over optical
fiber from the hub, or central office, to fiber terminating nodes called optical network units
(ONU). The expectation is that fiber would get much closer to the subscriber with this
architecture.
⮚ IN FTTH (fiber to the home) architecture, the ONUS would perform the function of NIU> Here
the optical fiber is used to transmit data from central office to remote node(RN) and RN to home.
⮚ In network from the co to ONU is typically a passive optical network(PON). The remote node is
a simple passive device such as an optical star coupler and it may some be collocated in the
central office itself rather than in the field.
⮚ Although many different architectural alternatives can be used for FTTC, the term FTTC
is usually used to describe a version where the signals are broadcast from the central

13
 office to the ONUS, and the ONUS share a common total bandwidth in time division
multiplexed fashion.
⮚ In FTTC, the fiber is within about 100m of the end user. In this case, there is an
additional distribution network from the ONUS to the NIUS with the fiber to the cabinet
(FTTcab) approach, the fiber is terminated in a cabinet in the neighborhood and is within
about 11cm of the end user.

AON: All optical networks

All optical network (AON) consortium consisting of AT&T Bell laboratories, digital equipment co-
operation and Massachusetts institute of technology developed a test bed for light wave
communication.

⮚ The aim of the test bed was to demonstrate a single routing mode in a network operating at a
transmission rate of 100 lib/s.
⮚ Packet interleaving was used and packets from electronic sources at 100 Mb/s were optically
compressed to the 100 lib/s rate using optical time division multiplexing.

14
 ⮚ AON supported different classes of service, specifically guaranteed bandwidth service and
bandwidth-on-demand service.
⮚ The topology used in the above diagram is bus topology where users transmit in the top half of
the bus and receive from the bottom half. However, each user is attached for transmission to two
points on the bus such that the guaranteed bandwidth transmission are always upstream from the
bandwidth-on-demand transmission since it having helical shape, the name helical LAN(HLAN)
for this network.

Optical Network Management Functions

Classically, network management consists of several functions, all of which are important to the
operation of the network

1. Performance management deals with monitoring and managing the various parameters that
measure the performance of the network. Performance management s an essential function that
enables a service provider to provide quality-of-service guarantees to their clients and to ensure that
clients comply with the requirements imposed by the service provider.

2. Fault management is the function responsible for detecting failures when they happen and isolating
the failed component. The network also needs to restore traffic that may be disrupted due to the
failure, but this is usually considered a separate function.

3. Configuration management deals with the set of functions associated with managing Orderly
changes in a network. The basic function of managing the equipment in the network belongs to this
category. This includes tracking the equipment in the network and managing the addition/removal of
equipment, including any rerouting of traffic this may involve and the management of software
versions on the equipment.

4. Security management includes administrative functions such as authenticating users and setting
attributes such as read and write permissions on a per-user basis. From a security perspective, the
network is usually partitioned into domains, both horizontally and vertically. Vertical partitioning
implies that some users may be allowed to access only certain network elements and no other network
elements.

5. Accounting management is the function responsible for billing and for developing life time
histories of the network components. This function is the same for optical networks, compared to
other networks, and we will not be discussing this topic further.

Management Framework
Most functions of network management are implemented in a centralized manner by a hierarchy
of management systems. However, this method of implementation is rather slow, and it can take
several hundreds of milliseconds to seconds to communicate between the management system and the
different parts of the network because of the large software path overheads usually involved in this
process.

15
 Decentralized methods are usually much faster than centralized methods, even in small networks
with only a few nodes. Therefore, certain management functions that require rapid action may have to
be decentralized, such as responding to failures and setting up and taking down connections if these
must be done rapidly.

Overview of network management

Information Model
The information to be managed for each network element is represented in the form of an
information model (IM). The information model is typically an object-oriented representation
that specifies the attributes of the system and the external behavior of the network element with
respect to how it is managed.

It is implemented in software inside the network element as well as in the element and
network management systems used to manage the network element, usually in an object-oriented
programming language.

Management Protocols
Most network management systems use a master-slave sort of relationship between a
manager and the agents managed by the manager.

The manager queries the agent to obtain the status of parameters in the network element
(called the get operation). For example, the manager may query the agent periodically for
performance monitoring information.

16
 The manager can also change the values of variables in the network element (called the
set operation) and uses this method to effect changes within the network element.

TMN defines a hierarchy of management systems and object-oriented ways to model the
information to be managed, and also specifies protocols for communicating between managers
and their agents. The protocol is called the common management information protocol (CMIP),
which usually runs over an open systems interconnection (OSI) protocol stack; the associated
management interface is called a Q3 interface.

Optical CDMA
  The simplest configuration, CDMA achieves multiple access by assigning a unique code
to each user.
To communicate with another node, user imprint their agreed upon code onto the data. The
receiver can then decode the bit stream by locking onto the code sequence.
The principle of optical CDMA is based on spread-spectrum techniques.
The concept is to spread the energy of the optical signal over a frequency band that is much
wider than the minimum bandwidth required to send the information.
Spreading is done by a code that is independent of the signal itself.
On optical encoder is used to map each bit of information into the high-rate (longer-code-length)
optical sequence.
The symbol is the spreading codes are called chips.
The energy density of the transmitted waveform is distributed more or less uniformly over the
entire spread-spectrum bandwidth.
The set of optical sequences becomes a set of unique ‘address codes or signature sequences’ the
individual network users.

 
The signature sequence contains six chips. When the data signal contains 1 data bit, the six-chip
sequence is transmitted, no chips are sent for a 0 data bit.

17
Time-domain optical CDMA allows a number of users to access a network simultaneously,
through the use of a common wavelength.
Both asynchronous and synchronous optical CDMA techniques. In synchronous accessing
schemes follow rigorous transmission schedules, the produce more successful transmission
(higher throughputs) than asynchronous methods where network access is random and collisions
between users can occurs.
An optical CDMA network is based on the use of a coded sequence of pulses.
The setup consists of N transmitter and receiver pairs interconnected in a star

 
To send information from node j to node k, the address code for node k is impressed upon the
data by the encoder at node j.
At the destination, the receiver differentiates between codes by means of correlation detection.
 
Each receiver correlates its own address f(n) with the received signal s(n). The receiver output
r(n) is

18
 
If the received signal arrives at the correct destination, then s(n)=f(n).
Equation (5.57) represents an autocorrelation function, if s(n) not equal to  f(n) the equation
(5.57) represents a cross-correlation function.
For a receiver to be able to distinguish the proper address correctly, it is necessary to maximize
the autocorrelation function and minimize the cross-correlation function.
Prime-sequence codes and optical orthogonal codes (OOCs) are the commonly used spreading
sequences in optical CDMA systems.
An OOC systems the number of simultaneous user an is bounded by

Optical Solitons
In optics, the term soliton is used to refer to any optical field that does not change during
propagation because of a balance between nonlinear and dispersive effects in the medium. In
both cases, the nonlinear part in equations is a consequence of the Kerr effect in media.

The Kerr effect is a phenomenon where an applied electrical field induces a change in
the refractive index of a material. What distinguishes the Kerr effect from others of this kind
(e.g. the Pockels effect) is that the change in refractive index is directly proportional to the
square of the electric field (or in other words, directly proportional to the intensity).

The refractive index is then described by the following equation:

There are two main kinds of optical solitons:

● Spatial solitons
● Temporal solitons.

Temporal solitons were discovered first and are often simply referred to as solitons in
optics. We talk about temporal solitons when the electromagnetic field is already spatially
confined (e.g. in optical fibers) and the pulse shape (in time) will not change because the
nonlinear effects balance dispersion.

19
Spatial solitons on the other hand may occur when the electromagnetic field is not spatially
confined but the pulse shape in space does not change with propagation because of nonlinear
effects (self-focusing) balancing out diffraction.

Formation of Solitons In Fibers

As an optical pulse travels down a fiber, the longer wavelength components of the light pulse
tend to fall behind since the wavelength range is in JR region. Thus, extending the trailing edge
increases the width of the pulse, so that the frequency at the leading edge is higher than at the
trailing edge. This is called optical (anomalous) dispersion and causes conventional optical
pulses to broaden.

Applications of Solitons

The effects due to nonlinearity and dispersion are destructive in OFC but useful in
Optical Soliton Fiber Communication (OSFC) systems. The soliton type pulses are highly stable.

20
Their transmission rate is more than 100times better than that in the best linear system. They are
not affected by the imperfections in the fiber geometry or structure.

Soliton can be propagated without any distortion if the nonlinear characteristics like
amplitude, intensity of the pulse-depending on velocity and the dispersion characteristics like
frequency-depending on velocity of the media, are balanced.

21