Intelligent Optical Router

The goal of this project is to build an intelligent optical router. The Optical Switching and Optical Signal Processing technologies coupled with advanced electronics technologies provide a wealthy means to create a very intelligent and versatile optical router. The UC Davis team has completed protyping of the first optical router and successfully demonstrated the field trial in the Sprint NTON network. The pursued optical router addresses the following important issues for the Next Generation Internet.
> Ultra-low latency (10~100 nsec) and protocol independent packet forwarding
> A scalable and power efficient router architecture
> Innovative optical technologies for switching and header processing
> Aggression of fine grained traffic into the Supernet
> Interoperability with MPLS, Optical-Burst Switching, MPLamdaS, and Optical-Label Switching
> End-to-End adaptive congestion management
All-optical Packet Switching Networks. In this project, we demonstrated the multi-hop cascaded operation of an optical packet routing system with all-optical label swapping. It emulates a network with multiple OLSRs, each providing label-based packet forwarding.
Packet-by-packet bit-error-rate measurements took place on P1 at each hop. We obtained about 0.7 dB power penalty compared to the baseband payload signal after one hop. However, a negative power penalty of about 0.2 dB at BER=1e-9 appears after the two hop OLSR, which is mainly due to the 2R regeneration in the SOA-based MZI WC and the
decrease in the received average power after two packet-droppings.
Contention Resolution for an Optical Packet Switching Networks. Packet contentions in a router arise when more than one packet attempts to reach the same output port at the same time. Electronic routers primarily rely on queuing and buffering in random access memories (RAM) to resolve contentions in the time domain. Unfortunately
practical optical RAMs are not available today. On the other hand, all-optical packet-switching routers can exploit an additional degree of freedom in the wavelength domain, and thus implement contention resolution schemes in wavelength, time and space domains. In this project, we demonstrate packet-bypacket contention resolution with comprehensive contention scenario in the three domains and with 2R regeneration. We achieved about -0.5 dB power penalty at 1E-9 BER compared to the back-to-back result measured right after the label extractor. The negative power penalty is achieved by 2R regeneration from cross-phase modulation in the FWC.