An efficient switching technique for high speed DWDM networks

Tremendous increase in the Internet traffic has resulted in electronic processing bottleneck for communication networks. We propose a technique to alleviate this bottleneck in ultra-dense wavelength division multiplexed networks. This involves transmission of control information on a separate and dedicated channel, called the control channel. The packets on the control channel contain information about the routing of data packets on various channels. Thus, only control channel packets need processing at higher layer(s), while packets on the data channels can stay in the optical domain from source to destination.