A review of some aspects of bandwidth utilisation and optimisation in optical fibre communication networks

In this paper we describe some of the problems of the utilization of enormous bandwidth of optical fibre and discuss some of the attempts made to overcome the problems. In the first part we describe the techniques, such as WDM, TDM and SDM, and network architectures such a multihop bus topology and the perfect shufflenet. In the second part we give a review of optimisation problems arising in communication networks, such as minimising transmission, switching, multiplexing and demultiplexing costs and maximising revenue using integer linear programming and mixed integer programming methods.