The STARNET Coherent Optical WDM Network:, Modulation Format And Computer-to-optics Interface

STARNET is a novel experimental coherent optical WDM network being investigated at Stanford University. STARNET supports both circuit-switched traffic and packet-switched traffic by creating two logical sub-networks, a 2.488 Gb/s per node tunable circuit-switched sub-network and a 100 Mb/s FDDI compatible, fixed-tuned, packet-switched, ring subnetwork, on a single physical star topology [l]. Fig. 1 shows a diagram of the STARNET logical topology.