What is Metropolitan Area Network

Today’s telecommunication world is seeing dramatic changes in network infrastructures and services. These changes are mainly driven by the ever-growing rate of network traffic. Global Internet traffic is doubling each year due to both tremendous growth in the number of users and rapid increase of bandwidth accessible by each user (e.g., the Global Internet Geography report (2004) stated that in Asia, Internet traffic growth was about 400 percent in the year 2004). Not only is network traffic growing at an unprecedented speed, but the traffic mix is changing greatly. The traditional voice traffic volume has now become very small relative to the huge volume of data and video traffic, due to the deployment of Gigabit technologies in the access part of the service providers’ networks.