Switch architecture for optical burst switching networks

ABSTRACT Wepresent,a new ,switch architecture for optical burst switching networks ,that utilizes the just-in-time signaling protocol. Signaling is done out of band, with signaling messages undergoing electrooptical (EO) conversion at every hop while data, on the other hand, travels transparently through the configured path. The switch was implemented and deployed in advanced,technology demonstration,network (ATDNet); it is capable of processing,2.88 Gbps of signaling messages traffic on an Altera FPGA. Keywords: Optical burst switching, just-in-time signaling, switch architecture 1,INTRODUCTION The exponential growth of bandwidth demand,is driving the need for routers that operate at increasing bit-rates (OC192 toOC768) and that have a very large number of ports (10s to1000s). To meet this growing demand, routers that scale with the demand ,on both ,the bit-rate and port-count are needed. The increasing demand ,for bandwidth ,has led to the development,of optical fibers that could support very high bit-rates. Dense wavelength,division multiplexing (dWDM) is the preferred solution for providing higher bandwidth; dWDM increases the bandwidth ,of a ,single optical fiber by creating multiple virtual fibers, each carrying multi-gigabits of traffic per second, on a single fiber. The demand ,for more bandwidth ,is fueled by packet,switched IP traffic and the traffic generated by higher ,layer protocols and applications, such as the World Wide Web which is bursty in nature. Optical burst switching (OBS), combines,the best of optical circuit switching and packet switching and can be used,to carry IP over dWDM. In OBS networks a control packet is sent first, on a separate signaling channel, to set up a connection followed by a data burst without waiting for an acknowledgement for path establishment. This paper introduces a new switch architecture designed and implemented,to demonstrate the just-in-time signaling