To support bursty traffic on the Internet (and especially WWW) efficiently, optical burst switching (OBS) is proposed as a way to streamline both protocols and hardware in building the future gener...

Optical burst switching (OBS) - a new paradigm for an optical Internet

Power consumption and the footprint of future network elements are expected to become the main limiting factors for scaling the current architectures and approaches to capacities of hundreds of terabits or even petabits per second. Since the underlying demand for network capacity can be satisfied only by contemporaneously increasing transmission bit rate, processing speed, and switching capacity, it unavoidably will lead to increased power consumption of network nodes. On the one hand, using optical switching fabrics could relax the limitations to some extent, but large optical buffers occupy larger areas and dissipate more power than electronic ones. On the other hand, electronic technology has made fast progress during the past decade regarding reduced feature size and decreased power consumption. It is expected that this trend will continue in the future. This paper addresses power consumption issues in future high-capacity switching and routing elements and examines different architectures based on both pure packet-switched and pure circuit-switched designs by assuming either all-electronic or all-optical implementation, which can be seen as upper and lower bounds regarding power consumption. The total power consumption of a realistic and appropriate technology for future high-performance core network nodes would probably lie somewhere between those two extreme cases. Our results show that implementation in optics is generally more power efficient; especially circuit-switched architectures have a low power consumption. When taking into account possible future developments of Si CMOS technology, even very large electronic packet routers having capacities of more than hundreds of terabits per second seem to be feasible. Because circuit switching is more power efficient and easier to implement in optics than pure packet switching, the scalability limitation due to increased power consumption could be considerably relaxed when a kind of dynamic optical circuit switching is used within the core network together with an efficient flow aggregation at edge nodes.

Analysis of Power Consumption in Future High-Capacity Network Nodes

The Information Society Technologies-all-optical LAbel SwApping employing optical logic Gates in NEtwork nodes (IST-LASAGNE) project aims at designing and implementing the first, modular, scalable, and truly all-optical photonic router capable of operating at 40 Gb/s. The results of the first project year are presented in this paper, with emphasis on the implementation of network node functionalities employing optical logic gates and optical flip-flops, as well as the definition of the network architecture and migration scenarios.

/pdf/ist-lasagne-towards-all-optical-label-swapping-employing-410awr7j1v.pdf

IST-LASAGNE: towards all-optical label swapping employing optical logic gates and optical flip-flops

In recent years hybrid optical network architectures, which employ two or more network technologies simultaneously, were proposed. They aim at improving the overall network design by combining the advantages of different technologies while avoiding their disadvantages. In order to structure this developing research field, we classify such hybrid architectures based on the degree of interaction and integration of the network technologies. Also, we discuss the three classes and their main representatives regarding key characteristics, performance benefits, and realization complexity. Finally, we highlight two hybrid architectures and show their key benefits compared to the respective non-hybrid architectures through a dimensioning case study

/pdf/hybrid-optical-network-architectures-bringing-packets-and-5djcjuocij.pdf

Hybrid optical network architectures: bringing packets and circuits together

This paper presents solutions towards an efficient and intelligent network infrastructure for Grid services, taking advantage of recent developments in optical-networking technologies. Two lambda-Grid network architectures based on extensions to existing wavelength-switched network infrastructure are discussed. These network solutions aim to provide a user-centric Grid environment, specifically for data-intensive and e-science applications. Furthermore, a novel solution towards an intelligent and ubiquitous photonic-Grid network based on optical burst switching (OBS) is proposed. The proposed solution utilizes active optical burst-switched routers and advanced protocols in order to provide a programmable photonic-Grid network infrastructure for evolving data-intensive and emerging Grid applications.

Dynamic optical-network architectures and technologies for existing and emerging grid services

For the next generation of the optical internet, focus is now moving from circuit switched networks, which occupy a wavelength continuously regardless of the demand at that time, towards optical packet/burst switching By only occupying a wavelength when data is to be transmitted, a more efficient utilization of bandwidth in optical fibers is strived for As bandwidth in fibers keeps increasing, the bottleneck of the optical network is now moving towards the switching node, since evolution of electronic routers cannot follow the speed of bandwidth increase Thus a key component in these novel networks is the optical node Through this node we want to switch traffic very fast and reliably, preferably transparent Lack of efficient and practically realizable optical buffer, however, makes migration from electronic routers to optical routers a non-straightforward transition In most optical nodes payload traffic can be switched transparently, whilst control information (eg, in a header, on a control channel) is still converted to the electronic domain in every node, since optical processing is far from mature In this paper we present a possible architecture for such a node, array waveguide gratings and all-optical tuneable wavelength converters The concept of this switch is explained and the node is evaluated in terms of loss rate We will see that an inherent problem of this switch is its internal blocking This drawback can be greatly overcome by using an intelligent and efficient wavelength assignment algorithm within the node Simulation of slotted operation will give some numerical results

/pdf/routing-in-an-awg-based-optical-packet-switch-3mcov9pujr.pdf

Routing in an AWG-based optical packet switch

https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/348026/file/568344.pdf

A broad view on overspill routing in optical networks: a real synthesis of packet and circuit switching?

Packet switched based network architectures exhibit a high degree of resource sharing and consequently make very efficient use of the available bandwidth. On the other hand, they experience a great amount of transit traffic in IP routers, increasing costs. Wavelength switched based concepts can reduce this transit traffic, but have limited resource sharing and consequently need more resources (wavelengths) to avoid losses. We present a new hybrid network architecture, Overspill Routing In Optical Networks (ORION), which combines the benefits of wavelength switched networks and packet switched networks. An example node hardware design and corresponding control architecture is presented. A case study quantifying the benefits of ORION when compared to three other network architectures is also discussed.

Overspill routing in optical networks: a new architecture for future-proof IP-over-WDM networks

Grid computing offers high levels of computational, storage and network capacity by bundling and sharing resources through a uniform interface. In its current form, Grids are restricted to only a small application area, and deployment proceeds mainly for specific problems. However, if Grids are to become as ubiquitous as electrical power delivery by making it available to the public at large, several network-related problems will have to be solved first. In this paper, we show the limitations of the currently deployed optical networks, by evaluating future applications for the Grid. Subsequently, we propose a novel architecture based on Optical Burst Switching, and clearly show the advantages of our approach.

Erik Van Breusegem

Papers

Hybrid optical network architectures: bringing packets and circuits together

Routing in an AWG-based optical packet switch

A broad view on overspill routing in optical networks: a real synthesis of packet and circuit switching?

Overspill routing in optical networks: a new architecture for future-proof IP-over-WDM networks

An OBS architecture for pervasive grid computing