Amplifier Issues for Physical Network Control

Over the past decade transmission systems have evolved from simple point-to-point architectures with a few amplified spans into continental scale transparently coupled mesh networks. As the client to client traffic granularity grows to fill multiple wavelengths, one expects that the traffic engineering capabilities available today in the data layers will become advantageous in the physical or wavelength layer of the network. Today, the limitations of optical amplifiers in terms of their ability to support dynamic loading conditions impede the implementation of such flexibility in large scale transparent networks.