Photonic Slot Routing in Optical Transport Networks

All-optical networking is generally believed to be the only solution for coping with the ever-increasing demands in bandwidth, such as the World Wide Web application. <br/> Optical backbone networks efficiently achieve a high level of traffic aggregation by multiplexing numerous users on circuit-switched wavelength paths - the so-called wavelength routing approach. In contrast, the reduced level of traffic aggregation in access and metro networks makes wavelength routing solutions not adequate. In these network areas, packet-interleaved optical time-division multiplexing with its finer and more dynamic bandwidth allocation is advocated. <br/> The book presents such an approach, known as photonic slot routing. It illustrates how this approach may provide a cost-effective solution to deploying all-optical transport networks, using today's optical device technology. To that end, the author combines DWDM-technology with fixed slot optical switching, and gives a comprehensive description of this approach in which slots are aligned across the wavelengths to form groups of data-flows that propagate as a whole inside the network. Operating algorithms are developed, and network performance is analyzed, both by means of theoretical analysis and many simulations of sample networks. <br/> This work will be of particular interest to researchers and professionals who are active in photonic networking.