IP over WDM: Building the Next Generation Optical Internet

Rating:
Summary: Inevitable growth
Review: This book claims to be the first to describe how to combine the physical layer of a DWDM optical network with the Internet Protocol layer of a TCP/IP structure. Can this be so? It was published in late 2003. Seems rather late. Surely another earlier book would have described this topic.

Certainly, there is no gainsaying the importance of the topic. DWDM is used in long haul optical networks, because those fibres are at a premium. But DWDM is probably also increasingly used in shorted optical networks, like inside a city. If the net is used primarily for phone transmission, then those protocols are quite different from TCP/IP. But the growth rates of data transmission are greater in the developed world than those for voice, typically. And it appears that eventually, the Internet will subsume other communications protocols. Hence the need for this topic and a book like this.

It explains DWDM to a newcomer to the field. Experienced readers can safely skip entire sections of the book. On discussions of Quality of Service, IPv6 is mentioned. Because it is really only in this that QoS can be implemented at a fundamental level. The current IP (version 4) was never designed with QoS in mind.