Terabit burst switching

  • Authors:
  • Jonathan S. Turner

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • Journal of High Speed Networks - Special issue on optical networking
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

Demand for network bandwidth is growing at unprecedented rates,placing growing demands on switching and transmission technologies.Wavelength division multiplexing will soon make it possible tocombine hundreds of gigabit channels on a single fiber. This paperpresents an architecture for Burst Switching Systems designed toswitch data among WDM links, treating each link as a sharedresource rather than just a collection of independent channels. Theproposed network architecture separates burst level data andcontrol, allowing major simplifications in the data path in orderto facilitate all-optical implementations. To handle short databursts efficiently, the burst level control mechanisms in burstswitching systems must keep track of future resource availabilitywhen assigning arriving data bursts to channels or storagelocations. The resulting Lookahead Resource Management problemsraise new issues and require the invention of completely new typesof high speed control mechanisms. This paper introduces theseproblems and describes approaches to burst level resourcemanagement that attempt to strike an appropriate balance betweenhigh speed operation and efficiency of resource usage.