ESnet Chief Technologist Inder Monga is co-author of “Optical Networks Come of Age,” was has just been published in the September 2014 issue of Optics and Photonics News.

Although fiber optic transmission capacity has grown by seven orders of magnitude in just 20 years, these systems serve mainly as the “fat pipes,” the large-scale plumbing of the Internet, according to the article. But that is changing.

“Greater use of optical networks—particularly in network edge applications that carry less aggregated, more “bursty,” service traffic—and continued traffic growth will soon revise this picture,” the authors write. “A changing landscape in fiber optic communication technologies is stimulating a resurgence of interest in optical switching. These trends are coming together in ways that hold promise for the long-anticipated widespread deployment of optically switched fiber networks that respond in real time to changing traffic and operator requirements.

“The ultimate mission is to enable the next-generation Internet—one that can support terabit-per-second speeds, but that remains economical and energy efficient,” the authors write.

In addition to Monga, the authors are Daniel Kilper, University of Arizona; Keren Bergman, Columbia University; Vincent W.S. Chan, MIT; George Porter, University of California, San Diego; and Kristin Rauschenbach, Notchway Solutions LLC.

A pdf of the article can be found at: lightwave.ee.columbia.edu/files/kilper2014a.pdf