A study of the economics, operations and applications of SONET self-healing ring architectures

The economics, operations, and applications of synchronous optical network (SONET) unidirectional and bidirectional self-healing ring architectures are studied in order to ascertain whether the use of the two different types of ring architecture for SONET networks is advisable, both from an economic and operations viewpoint. It is shown that there are economic advantages to using both types of rings in a single network. From an operations perspective, the study shows that each ring type affects operations, although the bidirectional self-healing ring is more consistent with today´s point-to-point methodology