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of ECE, NITH) Client Layers of the Optical Layer October 20, 2019 1 / 15
 Client Layers of the Optical Layer

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 Client Layers of the Optical Layer Client Layers of the Optical Layer

Goal
• Study several networks that use optical fiber as their underlying transmission
mechanism.
• These networks can be thought of as client layers of the optical layer.

Figure 1: A layered view of a network consisting of a second-generation optical network layer that supports a
variety of client layers above it.

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 Client Layers of the Optical Layer Client Layers of the Optical Layer

• The optical layer provides lightpaths to the client layers.

• Various Client Layers:
• SONET/SDH
• OTN
• Ethernet
• IP
• Fiber channel

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 Client Layers of the Optical Layer Client Layers of the Optical Layer

Public Network

Figure 2: Different parts of a public network.

• Different parts of public network

• Metropolitan Network
• Metro Access Network
• Metro Interoffice Network
• Long-haul Network

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 Client Layers of the Optical Layer SONET/SDH

SONET/SDH

• SONET (Synchronous Optical Network) is the transmission and multiplexing

standard for high-speed signals within the carrier infrastructure in North Amer-
ica.
• SDH (Synchronous Digital Hierarchy) is a closely related standard, and it has
been adopted in Europe and Japan.
• SONET is widely used in telephone network and is one of the first large scale
optical transmission systems.
• Digital information is sent through optical fibers using a LED or a LASER
source.
• Most of data processing, switching etc. are done electronically.
• Prior to SONET and SDH, the existing infrastructure was based on the ple-
siochronous digital hierarchy (PDH).
• At that time the primary focus was on multiplexing digital voice circuits.
• PDH suffered from several problems, which led carriers and vendors alike to
seek a new transmission and multiplexing standard in the late 1980s.

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 Client Layers of the Optical Layer SONET/SDH

Table 1: Transmission rates for asynchronous and plesiochronous signals

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 Client Layers of the Optical Layer SONET/SDH

Benefits of SONET/SDH over PDH

• Multiplexing Simplification

Figure 3: Comparison of asynchronous and synchronous multiplexing.

• Management
• Interoperability
• Network Availability
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 Client Layers of the Optical Layer SONET/SDH

Multiplexing in SONET/SDH
• The basic signal rate for SONET is 51.84 Mb/s, called the synchronous trans-
port signal level-1 (STS-1).
• After conversion to optical signals, STS- 1 is known as optical carrier, OC-1 .
• Higher-rate signals (STS-N) are obtained by interleaving the bytes from N
frame-aligned STS-1s.
• No bit stuffing is required due to the synchronised clock.
• A lower speed data stream can be easily extracted without having to demulti-
plex the entire signal.
Table 2: Transmission rates for SONET/SDH

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 Client Layers of the Optical Layer SONET/SDH

SONET Layer

• The SONET layer consists of four sublayers—the path, line, section, and
physical layers.
• Each layer, except for the physical layer, has a set of associated overhead
bytes that are used for several purposes.
• The path layer in SONET is responsible for end-to-end connections
between nodes.

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 Client Layers of the Optical Layer SONET/SDH

Figure 4: SONET layers showing terminations of the path, line, and section layers for a sample connection
passing through terminal multiplexers (TMs) and add/drop multiplexers (ADMs).

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 Client Layers of the Optical Layer ATM

ATM

• As the

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 Client Layers of the Optical Layer IP

IP

• A

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 Client Layers of the Optical Layer Storage Area Networks

Storage Area Networks

• A

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 Client Layers of the Optical Layer Ethernet

Ethernet

• A

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