PHOTONIC TECHNOLOGIES AND DEVICES FOR MULTIWAVELENGTH NETWORK APPLICATIONS

Fast and quick growth of potential need for broadband services which maybe offered by public network operators to business and residential users cannot be easily satisfied by a simple evolution of current electronic technology. In principle, photonic technology is ready to offer a huge increase in the overall transport capability of present networks, by using both the wavelength multiplexing principle and the optical overlay concept. a practical exploitation of these principles still needs a large amount of theoretical modelling and experimental work, along the guidelines which have been carried out within the RACE project ''MultiWavelength Transport Network'', where an optical network test bed has been fully implemented by using state of the art optoelectronic integrated devices. Results of this work will be presented here, with special attention to those aspects which need further improvement, and where different solutions may offer better alternatives.