High performance network with merged optical and IP

The ubiquitous network is, in a sense, the ultimate goal of communication services. As the desire for ubiquitous network becomes increasingly clear, network service providers are anticipated to develop a high performance network infrastructure for providing larger capacity and more flexible communication services. If such a communication infrastructure can be constructed inexpensively while retaining scalability, it should present a new business opportunity for network service providers. This paper presents a new network infrastructure that merges optics with IP, and then studies how to realize the infrastructure and what the component technologies are. In addition, this paper takes a look at the network elements that comprise an optical-IP merged network and services.