The explosive growth of data, particularly internet traffic, has led to a dramatic increase in demand for transmission bandwidth imposing an immediate requirement for broadband networks. The primary objective of the COST 291 Action "Towards Digital Optical Networks" was to focus on novel network concepts, subsystems and architectures to enable future telecommunication networks, exploiting the features and properties of photonic technologies.
Three working groups were established to deal with these research objectives:
WG1 "Optical processing for digital network performance", dealt with the physical layer and implementation related issues of transparent optical networks such as optical signal per bit processing, optical switch architecture designs and implementations as well as transmission related issues.