Design of an optical interconnection network for Terabit IP router

The key to the success of next generation Internet lies in the development of Terabit IP routers. One of the challenging issues is to build a high-capacity switching system to provide high speed interconnection for a number of small-capacity router modules (RMs): where IP route lookup, packet storage, segmentation and reassembly, classification and filtering, buffer management, and packet scheduling are performed. Here, by taking advantages of optical and electronic technologies, we propose an optical interconnection network (OIN) to interconnect multiple RMs at 10Gb/s in the 1550 nm window.