Design and experimental demonstration of a variable-length optical packet routing system with unified contention resolution

• Published in: Journal of lightwave technology Vol. 22; no. 11; pp. 2570 - 2581
• Main Authors: Fei Xue, Zhong Pan, Haijun Yang, Jinqiang Yang, Jing Cao, Okamoto, K., Kamei, S., Akella, V., Yoo, S.J.B.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.11.2004; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Communication system traffic control; Computer networks; Contention resolution; Design engineering; Field programmable gate arrays; Networks; Optical arrays; Optical control; Optical design; Optical fiber networks; optical label switching (OLS); Optical packet switching; optical packet switching (OPS); optical performance monitoring; Optical variables control; Packets (communication); Routers; Routing; Routing (telecommunications); Switching theory; Systems integration; time-to-live (TTL); Traffic control; variable-length packets; wavelength conversion
• ISSN: 0733-8724; 1558-2213
• DOI: 10.1109/JLT.2004.836747

This paper presents theoretical design, network simulation, implementation, and experimental studies of optical packet routing systems supporting variable-length packets. The optical packet switching network exploits unified contention resolution in core routers in three optical domains (wavelength, time, and space) and in edge routers by traffic shaping. The optical router controller and lookup table, implemented in a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), effectively incorporates the contention resolution scheme with pipelined arbitration of asynchronously arriving variable-length packets. In addition, real-time performance monitoring based on the strong correlation between the bit-error rates of the optical label and those of the data payload indicates its application in optical time-to-live detection for loop mitigations. Successful systems integration resulted in experimental demonstration of the all-optical packet switching system with contention resolution for variable-size packets.