Following the emergence of lasers and optical fibers, optical networking made its beginning in the 1970s with high-speed LANs/MANs. In the 1980s, when the bandwidth of intercity microwave links turned out to be inadequate for digital telephony, the technology for single-wavelength optical communications using SONET/SDH arrived as a saviour to replace the microwave links. However, single-wavelength links couldn't utilize the huge bandwidth (40 THz) of optical fibers, while the bandwidth demands kept soaring. This necessitated the use of wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) for concurrent transmission over multiple wavelengths, increasing the available bandwidth significantly. Today, optical networking has become an indispensable part of telecommunication networks at all hierarchical levels. The book Optical Networks provides a graduate level presentation of optical networks, capturing the past, present and ensuing developments with a unique blend of breadth and depth. The book is organized in four parts and three appendices. Part I presents an overview and the enabling technologies in two chapters, Part II presents the single-wavelength optical networks in three chapters, while Part III deals with the various forms of WDM optical networks in four chapters. Finally, Part IV presents some selected topics in six chapters, dealing with a number of contemporary and emerging topics. Optical Networks provides a comprehensive all-in-one text for beginning graduate as well as final-year undergraduate students, and also allows R&D engineers to quickly refresh the basics and then move on to emerging topics.

...the book's coverage extends from history to technology basics to systems and applications, with copious amounts of detail and considerable mathematical depth. * Bogdan Hoanca, Optics & Photonics News *
Well written with a comprehensive coverage of all major aspects of optical networking today. * Keith Blow, Aston Institute of Photonic Technologies *
Thorough, authoritative, and very useful for graduate students, researchers, and industry practitioners. * Rudra Dutta, North Carolina State University *
Current and forward looking, with a systematic overview of the evolution of optical networks. * Marija Furdek, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden *

Professor Debasish Datta served in the faculty of Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur for over 37 years till 2017. He visited several overseas universities including Stanford University, University of California at Davis, Chonbuk National University, South Korea, and University of Malaya. He served as a Guest Editor for IEEE JSAC for the special Issue on WDM-based Network Architectures and served on the Editorial Boards of IEEE Communication Surveys and Tutorials and Elsevier Journal of Optical Switching and Networking. Currently, he is engaged in mentoring researchers in the area of optical networks as a visiting professor at various Indian universities.