Emergence of small world behaviors in optical transport networks

Optical networks are ubiquitous these days in all corners of the globe. All the core networks are very much optical and they are the main traffic carriers for the people of the world. Over the last three decades, optical networks have gone through several changes. In this paper, we analyze the nodal degree changes in the topological aspects of the optical networks. Basically, the small world behaviors have been changed to a large extent in the recent past. In order to have an effective and fast communication, it is necessary to reduce the number of hop lengths from one node to other node. This leads to an increase in nodal degrees and thus the emergence of small world behaviors. In this article, we analyzed the topologies of 50 optical transport networks (OTNs). From the statistical analysis of the nodal degrees of these 50 OTNs and their evolution we found that the networks tend to show small world behaviors. We also compared the extent of small world behaviors found previously with the current ones. We found that 12 networks which did not exhibit small world behaviors a decade ago are having them now.