entity (a high capacity transport connection) a great amount of traffic directed toward the same end node is thus natu- ral, and the most direct way to do that is to adopt a higher bit rate. The introduction of 40 Gbit/s in the network was done to alleviate this problem, but it is not enough. Thus a higher speed of the order of 100 Gbit/s is required. Besides network design needs, hardware design requirements also call for a bit rate much higher than 10 Gbit/s. Even if the increasing quality of transceivers generated signals will probably bring to a reduction of transponders footprint, the DWDM systems real estate is in any case huge. A 200-channel system using 10 Gbit/s transmission and C + L band amplification needs 100 working and 100 protection transponders even if XFPs are used to compact two channels per transponder. Telecommunication Networks On a standard Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA) plat- form, this means 13 subracks and thus 5 racks only for transponders. This is a huge real estate, greater that that needed for a 30 Tbit/s router. The only way that seems possible to achieve a strong footprint reduction is to increase greatly the bit rate. For example, assuming that a 100 Gbit/s transponder will occupy a two rack-units card (four times the footprint assumed for Gbit/s), a system with a capacity of 2 Tbit/s using 100 Gbit/s channels will occupy 80 rack units for transponders, that is 5 ATCA subracks, much less than 13 needed in the 10 Gbit/s case. Moreover, if the power consumption per unit capacity will continue to decrease with increasing the bit rate as that occurred when moving from 2.5 to 10 Gbit/s and from 10 to 40 Gbit/s, a strong decrease of power consumption is also probable if the bit rate is increased up to 100 Gbit/s. Finally, the convergence on IP networking renders requirements related to routers archi- tecture very important. As detailed in Chapter 7, in order to fully exploit the advances in electronics, routers line cards need to increase the speed of the memo