Claims
- 1. A method of optical packet switching comprising the steps of:
receiving an IP packet; encapsulating the IP packet with an optical label; converting the encapsulated packet to a new wavelength as specified by local routing tables; and multiplexing the packet onto a fiber medium.
- 2. The method of claim 1 wherein said step of encapsulating is done by modulating a baseband label onto a RF subcarrier and then multiplexing with the IP packet on the same wavellength.
- 3. The method of claim 2 wherein multiplexing is electronic.
- 4. The method of claim 2 wherein multiplexing is optical.
- 5. The method of claim 1 wherein said step of wavelength converting is performed by a tunable laser.
- 6. An all-optical label swapping wavelength converter subsystem, comprising:
A two-stage SOA wavelength converter module comprising: A first stage XGM wavelength converter to erase the header from an IP packet using the inherent low-pass filtering function of XGM wavelength conversion in SOAs and to convert packets from an arbitrary network wavelength to a fixed internal wavelength; A fast wavelength tunable laser to enable wavelength conversion; and An interferometric wavelength converter as the second stage to rewrite the new label and to convert the packet to an outgoing wavelength with a fixed band reject filter (BRF);
- 7. The system of claim 6 wherein the new label is pre-modulated onto the fast tunable laser.
- 8. The system of claim 6 wherein the tunable laser is further used to drive one of the SOAs in the IWC.
- 9. The system of claim 6 wherein the first stage also converts an arbitrary polarization at the input to a fixed polarization at the output for the second stage converter.
- 10. A method of optical packet switching using all-optical label swapping with subcarrier multiplexed addressing, label swapping and forwarding functions performed by cascading a cross gain modulated semiconductor optical amplifier wavelength converter (XGM-WC)and an interferometric wavelength converter IWC, the XGM phase erasing labels and IWC performing packet rate wavelength conversion, IP packet regeneration and label reinsertion.
- 11. A method of optical packet switching comprising the steps of:
encapsulating an IP packet with an optical label by encoding a header onto an RF subcarrier and then multiplexing with the IP packet; converting the encapsulated packet to a new wavelength as specified by local routing tables; and multiplexing the packet onto a fiber medium; and forwarding the packet by swapping the original label with a new label and physically converting the labeled packet to a new wavelength.
RELATED APPLICATIONS
[0001] This application claims the benefit of the filing date of U.S. Provisional Application No. 60/231,381, filed on Sep. 8, 2000, entitled “All Optical Label Swapping using Two-stage Optical Wavelength Converters”, the contents of which are incorporated herein.
Government Interests
[0002] This invention was made with Government support under Grant No. ECS-9896283, awarded by the National Science Foundation; and Grant No. F49620-98-10399, awarded by the Department of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The Government has certain rights in this invention.
Provisional Applications (1)
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Number |
Date |
Country |
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60231381 |
Sep 2000 |
US |