Mini-slot TDM WDM optical networks

Abstract

In recent years, optical transport networks have evolved from interconnected SONET/WDM ring networks to mesh-based optical WDM networks. Time-slot wavelength switching is to aggregate the lower rate traffic at the time-slot level into a wavelength in order to improve bandwidth utilization. With the advancement of fiber-optics technologies, continual increase of fiber bandwidth and number of wavelengths in each fiber, it is possible to divide a wavelength in a fiber into time-slots, and further divide a time-slot into mini-slots so that the fiber bandwidth can be more efficiently utilized. This article proposes a router architecture with an electronic system controller to support optical data transfer at the mini-slot(s) of a time-slot in a wavelength for each hop of a route. The proposed router architecture performs optical circuit switching and does not use any wavelength converter. Each node in the mini-slot TDM WDM optical network consists of the proposed router architecture. Three different network topologies are used to demonstrate the effectiveness and behavior of this type of network in terms of blocking probability and throughput. © 2007 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.