A novel all-optical transport network with time-shared wavelength channels

The high-speed and high-capacity transport networks are necessary for provi ding future broadband services and multimedia applications, The optical net works, such as wavelength-routed networks and optical switching networks, a re the most popular solutions, However, the limited electronic switching ca pability constrains the scalability of the multihop wavelength routed netwo rks, while the difficulty and complexity of implementing efficient optical buffers and optical contention resolution schemes constrains the developmen t of optical switching networks. This paper proposes a new architecture for the optical transport networks based on the proposed time-wavelength-space routers (TWSRs), The TWSR is equipped without optical buffers and optical contention resolution devices. A connection is established by constructing a time-slot based lightpath (ts-lightpath) between source TWSR and destinat ion TWSR, The paper also proposes a heuristic algorithm for the problem of establishing the set of efficient ts-lightpaths for a given set of connecti on requests. The effectiveness of the proposed network architecture with th e heuristic algorithm is demonstrated by simulation.