Scalable and energy-efficient optical tree-based greedy router

The IP prefix lookup as a core function of today´s Internet routers is becoming a bottleneck due to ever increasing throughput demands. The increase in the size of the routing tables limits the scalability of current routing architecture. Greedy routing as an alternative to IP routing does not require lookups in order to find the next hop, and neither requires storing a forwarding table in every node. In this routing, network nodes are assigned `coordinates´ and the incoming packets are forwarded to the neighbours which are closer to the packets destinations. In this paper, a novel all-optical greedy router has been designed. In order to perform the greedy routing, each node is assigned an ID which determines the location of the node in the spanning tree of the network. The router is constructed through the interconnection of SOAs and directional couplers. The circuit provides high data rate and is more scalable and more energy-efficient than conventional IP routers.