Development of an Autonomous Distributed Control System for Optical Packet and Circuit Integrated Networks

In this paper, we describe an autonomous distributed control system that we have been developing for an optical packet and circuit integrated network, and we experimentally evaluate its performance. Colored (i.e., multi-wavelength) optical packet-switched links transfer both control signals for circuit switching (e.g., signaling and routing) and best-effort packet data. We successfully transmitted high-definition uncompressed real-time video signals on two lightpaths established by our control system without degradation of video quality, simultaneously with other optical packet data transferred on the same optical fibers. Our developed control system not only achieved autonomous distributed signaling and routing but also has a function that can adjust wavelength resources for optical packet and circuit switching autonomously in each link at each node. Controllers achieved lightpath establishment within approximately 360 ms and dynamic resource adjustment within approximately 454 ms, in the best possible case in our experimental setup.