Extremely high-capacity, low-energy, and low latency optical networking for future infrastructure

Optical switching technologies have been attracting much attention because of the potential to save the cost and energy consumption. However, optical switching technologies have not been extensively used in the networks so far, while optical transmission technologies have been deployed widely. This paper figures out that the energy consumption of communication networks is going to rapidly increase with a continuous traffic increase. Then the “Dynamic Optical Path Network (DOPN) ” is introduced to resolve the energy and capacity crunches in future by fully taking advantage of optical switching technologies. DOPN transfers data at an extremely low latency set only by the propagation delay of lightwave through optical fibers and switches, which enables future telepresence applications with ultra-high quality images. Its actual demonstration will also be reported.