Limitations of all optical circuit-switched high data rate networks

This paper presents a method of adding a second dimension of optical encoding, as an out-of-band label, to be used for routing data through a label-switched network. Combining wavelength and code multiplexing techniques generates an optical circuit-switched network that can handle a data capacity of up to several Tb/s on each point-to-point link in the network. The proposed architecture uses two stages to process and map labels for each bit transmitted through the network. The architecture for the Dual Stage Optical Label Switch (DSOLS) is presented along with simulation results of its expected performance. A simulation package is used to analyze system performance. Using data generated from simulations a performance metric, based on Bit Error Rate (BER) to be used by an upper level routing algorithm is presented. Finally, a method of measuring the metric for a 2×2 (two codes and two wavelengths) DSOLS is described.