ALL-OPTICAL PACKET-SWITCHED METROPOLITAN-AREA NETWORK PROPOSAL

This paper describes a proposal submitted to DARPA in late 1991 by a c onsortium consisting of IBM, Los Alamos National Laboratory, GTE Labor atories, British Telecom Dupont Technologies, Lasertron, Micron Optics , University of California at Santa Barbara, and University of Colorad o at Boulder to develop a precompetitive, commercially viable all-opti cal network, architecture using dense optical wavelength division. The objective was to demonstrate a packet-switched high-capacity all-opti cal LAN/MAN network based on wavelength division multiplexing capable of supporting several hundred to a thousand nodes, each requiring giga bit-per-second throughputs.