Getting routers out of the core: Building an all-optical network with “multipaths”

We propose an all-optical networking solution for an Internet core network based on the notion of multipoint-to-multipoint lightpaths that, for short, we call multipaths. The multipath MAC protocol concentrates the traffic of a cluster of source nodes on a wavelength channel and multicasts this traffic to a cluster of destination nodes. The proposed network can be built using existing components and is shown to bring significant energy savings compared to classical, router-based core networks. A flow-aware DBA algorithm is proposed and shown to have excellent performance.