<title>Heterogeneous traffic transport over optical networks</title>

Abstract

As all-optical networks emerge as the high-speed networking standard, the performance of optical networks for mixed traffic requires investigation. Currently, traffic on optical networks varies from monomedia or one type of session only, to multimedia, in which multiple monomedia sessions are presented as one multimedia session. Today's internet offers elementary examples of this, with modest video and audio clips accompanying data. The performance of multimedia sessions over optical networks has not met with user expectations, primarily due to network latency as a result of the underlying protocols in the network infrastructure. This protocol incompatibility has the most significant impact on multimedia IP traffic on optical networks. In this paper, a new structure for the transport of dissimilar packet and non-packet information over optical networks is presented. The use of edge devices permits the establishment of wavelengths between end points, which allows signaling to accompany multimedia transport. The use of "intelligence at the edge" of the network for processing results in less transmission overhead with this structure than is found in other methods. Several illustrations of the utility of this method are presented, and the impact on Quality of Service (QoS) is assessed.