The recent data explosion has created a burden on communications networks to provide the necessary capacities to support the network and its applications. Networks that were initially deployed
to carry low capacity voice circuits are now faced with the challenges of being increasingly adaptive, elastic and intelligent to accommodate the constantly evolving traffic it carries. These networks are going through massive transformations for new applications and critical data and while many of these networks have been around for years and have been adequately handling traffic demands, new services are pushing the demand for capacity. They are also evolving to become more organic where the characteristics of the network – performance and capabilities, are rapidly changing and becoming more stringent and intelligent. Networks that were built to sustain 45-155Mb/s of TDM/SONET/SDH traffic are now facing bottleneck situations and increased pressure to grow. These networks now face a need for capacities from 200Mb/s to 500Mb/s and up to as much as 1Gb/s…