An optical transport network is composed of optical transport systems deployed in thousands of office-buildings. As a common infrastructure to accommodate diversified communication services with drastic traffic growth, it is necessary not only to continuously convey the growing traffic but also to achieve high end-to-end communication quality and availability and provide flexible controllability in cooperation with service layer networks. To achieve high-speed and large-capacity transport systems cost-effectively, system configuration, applied devices, and the manufacturing process have recently begun to change, and the cause of failure or performance degradation has become more complex and diversified. The drastic traffic growth and pattern change of service networks increase the frequency and scale of transport-capacity increase and transport-network reconfiguration in cooperation with service networks. Therefore, drastic traffic growth affects both optical-transport-system configuration and its operational cycles. In this paper, we give an overview of the operational problems emerging in current nationwide optical transport networks, and based on trends analysis for system configuration and network-control schemes, we propose a vision of the future nationwide optical-transport-network architecture expressed using five target features.
