An optical overlay network concept for hard QoS requirements

It has long been argued that the best-effort strategy on which Internet is based will limit its use for real-time applications such as video or telephony. However, it has been shown that such services can indeed tolerate some jitter and rate variations through various error resilience and concealment techniques. Despite of that the Internet infrastructure is continuously upgraded with higher performance components, which further reduce the transmission problems; still there are certain classes of applications that undoubtedly will need new transmission paradigms. An example is the remote control of an industrial process that may require jitter levels down to a few microseconds. Another example is quantum cryptography where an optical transparent path between sender and receiver is to be established. In this paper we present a concept based on an optical overlay network infrastructure. This network concept can be applied in an incremental way and will enable the current network infrastructure to handle demands with such extreme QoS requirements.