It is commonly accepted today that optical fiber communications have revolutionized
telecommunications. Indeed, dramatic changes have been induced in the way we interact
with our relatives, friends, and colleagues: we retrieve information, we entertain and
educate ourselves, we buy and sell, we organize our activities, and so on, in a long list
of activities. Optical fiber systems initially allowed for a significant curb in the cost of
transmission and later on they sparked the process of a major rethinking regarding some,
generation-old, telecommunication concepts like the (OSI)-layer definition, the lack of
cross-layer dependency, the oversegmentation and overfragmentation of telecommunica-
tions networks, and so on.
