Advanced optical-label routing system supporting multicast, optical TTL, and multimedia applications

This paper reports on modern features of the optical-label switching (OLS) system in support of multicast, optical time-to-live (TTL), and video-streaming applications. We first propose and demonstrate optical-label switching core router architecture with multicast function. The multicast switching architecture provides reduced complexity and effective multicast contention resolution compared to conventional multicast-capable switching fabric. A proof-of-principle experiment successfully showed packet multicast forwarding with contention resolution. The all-optical TTL monitors the healthiness of the packet, and prevents degraded packets from traveling or looping further in the network. The experiment demonstrated successful packet discards based on optical signal-to-noise ratio degradation. Finally, we present an optical label switching edge router that supports aggregation, quality of service, and class of service, and we further demonstrate a video streaming application between Ethernet clients through the OLS edge routers and a core router. The modern features of OLS routers proposed and demonstrated in this paper indicate the viability of OLS technologies in future photonic Internet in support of modern applications.