Abstract

The vision of information networking calls for access to information at any time, from any place, in any volume, and in any form. This vision calls for a global network of distributed, interworking high-speed communication/computing capabilities. Fiber-optic systems address one of the information networking challenges, namely, the need to allow geographically separated applications to communicate with one another at backplane speeds. Another major challenge is to develop the system and software architectures needed to manage the enormous complexity of a global information network. We describe the nature of the complexity-management challenge and some of the system architecture efforts to solve it that are under way around the world.

© 1992 Optical Society of America