Short Courses

In the past decade optical transmission platforms around the world have aggressively adopted Reconfigurable Optical Add-Drop Multiplexer (ROADM) technology.  This technology is now firmly integrated into the product lines and roadmaps of transport systems worldwide, including carrier deployments of more than $1 billion of ROADM-packet transport in the last year. This represents a groundbreaking technology transformation of transparent optical switching displacing electrical grooming equipment on an extremely wide scale. Despite the commercial success, confusion has surrounded this technology because the architecture and ROADM market has evolved over the last decade to improve deficiencies as well as extend it to cover different topologies and applications.  There continues to be technology innovation that expands the capacity and flexibility of these systems. This course will give a historical perspective of how this technology evolved, the numerous network benefits driving commercial adoption, and how those benefits depend on the functionality of the technology employed. Finally, the course will describe how these technologies are being integrated into WDM systems and what types of networks most fully leverage the new capabilities to provide network value.

This course should enable you to:

• Describe the architectures and network level benefits of ROADM systems from earliest systems to most sophisticated deployments being planned today.

• Define the different ROADM architectures competing in the market.

• Summarize the functional differences between competing ROADM architectures, which will succeed in the long term and why.

• Compare the network economic advantages of ROADM networks.

• Compare the incremental cost of a ROADM to the network level savings it enables.

• Discuss the types of networks that most fully benefit from ROADM technology and why.

• Explain why the advantages of ROADM networks position the technology to have a role in all parts of the network, including data centers.

Anyone interested in more fully understanding the functionalities and benefits of ROADMs, including students, researchers, engineers, managers, and executives involved in ROADM development, network design, network planning, and network operations.

Thomas A. Strasser developed optical devices in his doctorate from Cornell University, at Eastman Kodak Research Labs (3 years) and at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ (7 years).   He pioneered the first commercial deployments of WSS ROADM systems as Chief Technologist at Photuris, and has developed advanced ROADM technology for the past 15 years as founder and CTO at Nistica, Inc. and VP of Technology at Molex LLC.   He has more than 60 patents and 100 presentations and publications in optics and communication devices.