All-optical packet-header-recognition techniques

As transmission speeds in the network core approach 40 Gb/s and beyond, the need to make faster routing decisions becomes increasingly evident. It may, therefore, be important to determine where it may be feasible to employ optical techniques to aid the electronics in making rapid routing decisions In conventional Internet routers, packets are switched to their destinations by interrogating their 24-bit destination IP addresses and matching them to entries in a large routing table using complicated longest prefix matching algorithms. Given that most core routers have only four to eight outgoing ports, it may be possible to determine a packet's outgoing port by looking at only a small subset of the 24 bits in the destination address. It may be feasible to build an optical bypass to vastly accelerate a conventional router.