The authors have captured what is going on and what is going to be going on in this field in a completely up-to-date treatment unavailable elsewhere. I learned a lot from reading it expect that you will too. From the Foreword by Paul E. Green, Research Fellow, Tellabs, Inc. The tremendous growth of bandwidth-intensive services such as the World Wide Web demonstrates the increase in performance that applications will demand from future networks. To meet this demand, optical networks are being deployed and are emerging as the next generation of high-capacity, multi-protocol networks. Engineers in communications and fiber optics, networking professionals, and graduate students in networking courses will benefit from this book"s unique coverage of the systems aspect of optical networks. Features: Provides a thorough presentation of the physical, architectural, and algorithmic issues of optimal network systems Covers both wavelength-division multiplexed (WDM) and time-division multiplexed (TDM) networks as well as SONET Provides an in-depth treatment of the design of advanced optical fiber transmission systems Discusses management and control of optical networks Covers the important aspects of established and emerging standards