For more than a decade, increasing the speed of a network to fulfill the exponential rise in demand for bandwidth has been one of the major goals of infrastructure providers and carriers worldwide. Significant progress has been made by transitioning to faster packet based protocols, deploying optical fiber infrastructure, and utilizing associated technologies. Advances have included technologies such as wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), and an overall increase in the speed of electronic and electro-optic components microprocessors, FPGAs, and optical transceivers.
Yet, with more and more real-time applications coming online, not only in the wireline but in particular in the mobile wireless sector, network latency (a synonym for ‘delay’) has become increasingly important. The new paradigm in designing network infrastructure is now driven by careful consideration of achieving both high network capacity and very low/ultra-low latency performance. Ultra-low latency networks can be beneficial in numerous industries and applications, such as emergency response, medical networks, military applications, and other time-sensitive environments.
