March 2001 Meeting

Sorrento Networks Facility Tour and Talk:
" Optical Networking Revolution - Architecture and Enabling Technologies"

The Optical Society of San Diego and this evening's host, Ed Miles, are pleased to present a talk by Dr. Jin-Yi Pan, with Sorrento Networks entitled " Optical Networking Revolution - Architecture and Enabling Technologies." The talk will be followed by a tour of the Sorrento Networks facility.

Abstract: The coming of the modern information age has brought about phenomenal growth in telecommunications-based services, driven primarily by the Internet. Once where megabits were sufficient, even terabits do not suffice. As the burgeoning expansion of the Internet continues along an unprecedented and unpredictable path, many new applications are foreseen and expected. These applications are placing increasing demands from both business and private customers for ultra-scalable, flexible, transparent, terabit speed, customized bandwidth services. In concert, rapid advances in Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM), optical switching, optical signal processing and the ensuing bandwidth explosion are ushering in altogether new paradigms for telecommunications networks.

This talk will review the newest demands for optical networking architecture, service and application evolution path, network control and signaling, and system vendors' wish list for optical components and sub-systems.

Speaker: Dr. Jin-Yi Pan is the vice president of optical networking and systems architecture of Sorrento Networks, Inc (www.sorrentonet.com). He is responsible for Sorrento Networks' next generation optical networking product lines. From 1996 to 1999, Dr. Pan was with Nokia Research Center and led the optical networking research and strategy development. From 1993 to 1996, he was with Bellcore (now Telcordia Technologies), where he participated the first nationwide optical networking project, MONET. Dr. Pan received his Ph. D. and MS degrees in electrical engineering from City University of New York, and his bachelor's degree in fiber optics from Zhejiang University of China.

March 2001 Meeting Review

Optical Networking Revolution:
Architecture and Enabling Technologies
by Justin Hodiak, SPAWAR Systems Center

Dr. Pan's talk focused on the emergence of dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) for metropolitan area optical networking. Dr. Pan provided his perspective on why DWDM is viable for metro networks even though the technology is expensive. New architectures and technologies are in the process of greatly increasing the available bandwidth within metro networks. Metro networks are the networks which connect the long-haul or backbone networks to various access networks.

Dr. Pan started out by introducing the current telecom infrastructure, then discussed the need for the paradigm shift away from the current infrastructure, architectural issues for implementing these new paradigms and the enabling technologies that are facilitating this revolution in networking. He then introduced the business area of Sorrento Networks.

The current telecom infrastructure consists primarily of SONET-type networks. This architecture features primarily ring and linear, point-to-point topologies. It uses time domain multiplexing (TDM) to combine information at various data rates. In existing networks, the optical portion of the network only delivers the data to and from electronic multiplexers. Since 1998, the data traffic demands, primarily in the form of IP traffic, have the exceeded voice traffic demands. While demand for voice traffic has been stable, demand for data traffic has been rising at a rapid exponential rate. SONET architecture is optimized for voice information and not for data traffic. In the long-haul carrier market, WDM (wavelength division multiplexing) links between SONET nodes have added capacity without addressing the different needs of the data traffic as compared to the voice traffic. Long-haul networks have been able to greatly increase the capacity of the networks by using WDM. WDM technology is relatively expensive but a far less expensive alternative to laying down new fiber in order to increase capacity.