Progress in research on photonic infrastructure for the next generation networks

Communication networks are evolving fast. They have to adapt to the major trends of today-the rapid increase in traffic volumes, changing character of networks becoming data-centric mainly because of the explosive growth of the Internet, a move to multimedia communication an the never ending demand of customers for mobility. Photonic infrastructure has already become the foundation of modern networks. However, it is still developing fast in both of its segments-transmission links and network nodes. While the transmission capacity of optical fibres has nor been fully utilised yet, optical signal processing that has to be applied in the network nodes to manipulate the huge data streams is still at its embryonic stage of development. One of the projects devoted to the key issues of optical transport is the COST 266 Action "Advanced infrastructure for photonic networks". In this contribution the programme and results so far achieved in the framework of this project will be reviewed from a broader perspective of network evolution.