All-optical path protection in the “Prometeo” test bed: an unidirectional WDM transparent self-healing ring in a field environment

Building very high capacity metropolitan or regional networks that are robust against failure and traffic surges and that will evolve smoothly with time, implies a number of difficult problems ranging from the need of high speed electronic processing to effective network control and management. At the state of the art, a large consensus exists on considering optical networking, based on wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), the framework in which these problems can be solved. Field trials are a prerequisite to transform WDM optical networking from an important research issue to a reliable technology available on the market. With this aim, Telecom Italia (the Italian network operator) has started the Promrteo field trial