Light-trail testbed for metro optical networks

Telecommunication networks have rapidly added staggering amounts of capacity to their long haul networks at low costs per bit using DWDM technologies. Concurrently, there has been a wave of new access technologies that are driving customers to demand high-speed, robust and customized data services. These dynamics have led to what is called the "metro gap" - the inability to leverage backbone capacity to create and distribute revenue generating services. This paper presents work(1) in progress at Iowa State Universities' High Speed Systems Engineering laboratory to address the metro gap problem. As an initial step towards solving this problem, we demonstrate a streaming media application over a 3 Gbps optical fiber network employing light-trail technology [1]. The testbed and application presented within illustrates a cost-effective platform and outlines high-speed system level design challenges. This complete solution enables high-bandwidth services to move closer to the user premises by combining commercially available network components and emerging network technologies.