Abstract

Driven by the need to expand service offerings without significant CAPEX, enthusiasm for next-generation SONET (NG-SONET) technologies continues to build throughout the cable and telecom industries. NG-SONET allows carriers to extend the capabilities and service lifetime of the existing trillion-dollar global SONET/SDH infrastructure. Although NG-SONET is a general term used to describe enhanced SONET/SDH services, it is most often used to refer to the combined use of Generic Framing Procedure (GFP), Virtual Concatenation (VCAT), and Link Capacity Adjustment Scheme (LCAS). GFP provides a standardized capability for carrying multiple types of traffic, VCAT improves bandwidth utilization by providing finer granularity during provisioning, and LCAS is used to dynamically change the capacity of an established link.

© 2005 Optical Society of America