Design and implementation of ultra-low latency optical label switching for packet-switched WDM networks

An ultra-low latency, high throughput Internet protocol (IP) over wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) packet switching technology for next-generation Internet (NGI) applications has been designed and demonstrated. This method overcomes limitations of conventional optical packet switching, which require buffering of packets and synchronization of bits, and optical burst switching methods that require estimation of delays at each node and for each path. An optical label switching technique was developed to realize flexible bandwidth-on-demand packet transport on a reconfigurable WDM network. The aim was to design a network with simplified protocol stacks, scalability, and data transparency. This network will enable the NGI users to send their data applications at gigabit/second access speed with low and predictable latency (<1 /spl mu/sec per switch node), with a system capacity of beyond multi-Tb/s. Packet forwarding utilizes WDM optical headers that are carried in-band on the same wavelength and modulated out-of-band in the frequency domain.