Since DWDM is a technology, it can technically be used in any part of the transport network. It mainly comes down to whether it’s worth it to use DWDM for that purpose, since a traditional DWDM system can be more expensive than CWDM. But, with the benefits of DWDM being high bandwidth, long distance, security and protocol independent, it is most often utilized by telecommunications and cable companies as part of their carrier transport network.
DWDM is also suitable for densely populated data centers such as co-location data center providers or hyperscale cloud service providers since it has the capability to combine several services together with independent tenants. Also, as data centers become more geo-distributed, DWDM is often used as the data center interconnect.
DWDM Applications
As mentioned previously, DWDM is often used by telecommunications, cable and data centers as part of their optical transport network. In the examples below, we highlight where DWDM can be applied to a carrier transport network and a data center network.
Carrier Transport Network
The carrier transport network is made up of several layers of aggregation called the access network, metro aggregation network, edge network and the core backbone network. DWDM is most often used in the metro aggregation network and the core backbone network.
DWDM in the metro aggregation network is used to combine data from several cities. As service providers bring more computing capabilities closer to their customers, DWDM is also flexible enough to meet their needs for higher bandwidth aggregation as they begin to converge more data into a single node to compute. The core backbone often deals with the high-speed switching of large amounts of data between their major central offices, which can span across several regions, states or even countries, which is also ideal for using DWDM.
DWDM in metro aggregation and core networks
Data Center Network
Data centers are an ever more important aspect of internet services and the data center interconnect (DCI) is a critical component to ensure the reliability and availability of data center services. DWDM can be a good addition to the DCI network as it typically needs to back up massive amounts of data to different data center locations.
DWDM in data center interconnect
However, with the challenges faced by data centers operators deploying data center interconnects, a more open, flexible and interoperable DCI network may be needed.