A SOLITON RING NETWORK

The recent demonstration of ultrafast, cascadable, all-optical soliton gates, although with long latency and at an early stage of research, opens the possibility of niche exploitation in architectures whose per formance is primarily limited by the absence of a few such logic eleme nts. A candidate system is a widely distributed, self-routing short pa cket, slotted ring system running at peak rates well beyond that of th e conventional electronic hosts at each access node. We describe here an architecture for a system with a 1.25GHz packet rate, 32-bit payloa d, and 100 Gb/s peak bit rate serving a few hundred user nodes. Optica l format is retained by through-going node traffic, so that the overhe ad of conversion to/from electronics is incurred only at the source an d destination. This design effort has served to sharpen our understand ing of the strengths and weaknesses of using such gates in carefully c hosen applications.