| In today's telecommunications world SONET dominates the network core of most carriers. SONET is popular due to its reliability and small restoration time. It was designed to carry voice traffic. But due to the Internet revolution data traffic surpassed voice traffic and there arose a need to look at other network architectures to carry data traffic more efficiently. Mesh networks, which promise enormous bandwidth savings form a good alternative to the traditional all SONET network.; The Mesh architecture has been around for quite some time but effects on various network parameters have not been explored to a great extent. Our study compares the SONET and Mesh architectures and explores their effect on the network latency. We have carried out simulations to calculate the propagation latency on a realistic national carrier network.; From the results, we conclude that the propagation latency for Mesh is lesser than that for SONET. Although the cost of laying a Mesh architecture is higher to start with, the returns and savings with it are much higher than that of a SONET architecture. |
