Building a low-energy transparent optical wide area network with "multipaths"

We propose an all-optical networking solution for a wide area network built on shared multipoint-to-multipoint lightpaths that, for short, we call "multipaths." A multipath concentrates the traffic of a group of source nodes on a wavelength channel using an adapted medium access control protocol and multicasts this traffic to a group of destination nodes that extract their own data from the confluent stream. The proposed network can be built using existing components and appears less complex and more efficient in terms of energy consumption than alternatives like optical packet switching and optical burst switching. The paper presents the multipath architecture and compares its energy consumption to that of a classical router-based Internet service provider network. A flow-aware dynamic bandwidth allocation algorithm is proposed and shown to have excellent performance in terms of throughput and delay.