All-Optical Network Coding

We investigate the application of network coding to all-optical networks from both the algorithmic and infrastructural perspectives. We study the effectiveness of using network coding for optical-layer dedicated protection of multicast traffic that provides robustness against link failures in the network. We present a heuristic for solving this problem and compare it with both inefficient optimal methods and non-network-coding approaches. Our experiments show that our heuristic provides near-optimal performance while significantly outperforming existing approaches for dedicated multicast protection. We also propose architectures for specialized all-optical circuits capable of performing the processing required for network coding and show how these devices can be effectively deployed in an all-optical multicast network.