A shared time-slot router architecture for TDM wavelength optical WDM networks

Recent advances of WDM technology provide multiple magnitude of raw bandwidth in a fiber. One of the effective ways of utilizing the gigabits bandwidth in a fiber is to partition each wavelength into fixed length time-slots for optical data transmission. In this paper, the shared time-slot wavelength router (STSWR) architecture that is capable to allow the bandwidth of a time-slot in a wavelength to be shared by low speed Ethernet data traffic with unexpired connection duration and travel along the same route from the same source STSWR to the destination STSWR is being considered. The shared time-slot of a route is not released until the connection duration of all the connections that are sharing this time-slot has expired. The STSWR has optical time-slot interchangers built-in. This architecture does not use any wavelength converter. The data in the time-slot are optically transmitted at each intermediate hop of a route. The effectiveness of this network architecture in blocking probability and throughput is demonstrated by simulation.