This practitioner's look at optical transmission gives you essential, hands-on guidance to engineering for optimal network performance. Real-world applications illustrate in detail the principles of transmission systems engineering. Complete with tables containing optical signal, noise and impairment parameters, this book is a useful tool for calculating and modelling network transmission capabilities, evaluating tradeoffs among systems parameters and transmission optimization, and assessing optical transport limits and penalties. The book includes a series of transmission scenarios that help you ensure network transmission under worst case conditions, establish benchmarks for innovating high-performance, high-reliability optical transmission equipment, and achieve other network performance goals. An overview of systems engineering and optical networking fundamentals quickly brings students and novices up to speed on a wide range of critical topics all practitioners need to understand.