Wavelength switched optical network (original) (raw)

Wavelength switched optical network (WSON) is a type of telecommunications network. A WSON consist of two planes: the data and the control planes. The data plane comprises wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) fiber links connecting optical cross-connect (OXCs) through a comb of several tens of wavelength channels, with typical data rates of 10 or 40 Gbit/s. Optical end-to-end connections (i.e., lightpaths) are established in the optical domain and switched by OXCs at the wavelength granularity.