High-performance optical-label switching packet routers and smart edge routers for the next-generation Internet

This paper discusses the architecture, protocol, analysis, and experimentation of optical packet switching routers incorporating optical-label switching (OLS) technologies and electronic edge routers with traffic shaping capabilities. The core optical router incorporates all-optical switching with contention resolution in wavelength, time, and space domains. It is also capable of accommodating traffic of any protocol and format, and supports packet, flow, burst, and circuit traffic. The edge router is designed to achieve traffic shaping with consideration for quality of service and priority based class-of-service. Simulation results show packet loss rates below 0.3% at load 0.7 and jitter values below 18 (mu)s. The traffic shaping reduces the packet loss rate by a factor of ~5 while adding negligible additional latency. The OLS core routers and the electronic edge routers are constructed including the field-programmable-gate-arrays incorporating the wavelength-aware forwarding and contention resolution algorithms. The experiment shows optical-label-based packet switching with a packet loss rate near 0.2%.