Optical Network Management

Optical networks will play an essential role in meeting the demands for future communications bandwidth. With such large traffic volumes at risk network management is fundamental to the running of such networks. To achieve this on an industrial scale management solutions must be based on an unambiguous framework that describes the entities that need to be managed. This chapter describes such a framework and provides a high level summary of how it can be applied to the management of both simple and complex structures. Nevertheless management of this new technology is still at a very early stage and considerable effort is required within the industry before the vision of an optical transport network can be fully realized.