A wavelength-switched time-slot routing scheme for wavelength-routed networks

Optical time division multiplexing (OTDM) is an effective approach to improve the performance of wavelength-routed (WR) networks. Implementation of all-optical time-slot routing in OTDM-WR networks is difficult owing to the lack of practical optical buffer and sophisticated optical processing devices. In this paper, a wavelength-switched time-slot routing scheme that can be implemented with fast wavelength converters only is proposed. Simulation results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed scheme is much better than that of WR networks and is comparable to OTDM-WR networks with time-shared space switching.