Multihomed optical packet and circuit integrated network based on hierarchical address allocation

An optical packet and circuit integrated network (OPCInet) provides both high-speed, inexpensive services and deterministic-delay, low-data-loss services according to the users' usage scenarios, from the viewpoint of end users. From the viewpoint of network service providers, this network provides large switching capacity with low energy consumption, high flexibility, and efficient resource utilization with a simple control mechanism. This paper presents the recent progress made in the development of OPCInet and its extension to software-defined networking (SDN). We have developed OPCI nodes, which are capable of layer 3 switching from/to an Ethernet frame to/from an optical packet in the optical packet edge part and a burst-tolerant optical amplifier and an optical buffer with optical fiber delays in 100 Gbps optical packet switching part. The OPCI node achieves a packet error rate less than 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-4</sup> and is used as a node in a lab-network that has access to the Internet. A distributed automatic control works in a control plane for the circuit switching part and in a moving boundary control between optical packet resources and circuit resources. Our optical system for packet and circuit switching works with a centralized control mechanism as well as a distributed control mechanism. We have shown a packet-based SDN system that configures mapping between IP addresses and OPCI node identifiers and switching tables according to the requests from multiple service providers via a web interface.

We develop an integrated optical packet and circuit switching node in which signaling via optical packet switching is implemented. We demonstrate 80 (8λ × 10) Gbit/s optical packet switching with <;1E-4 packet-loss-rate, 8-lightpaths establishment, and dynamic wavelength-resources control.

An optical packet and circuit integrated network (OPCInet) will allow diverse services, enhanced functional flexibility, and efficient energy consumption, as optical packet switching (OPS) and optical circuit switching (OCS) links are provided on the same infrastructure. In this paper, we design and develop a control system consisting of header processing for optical packets, signaling and routing for optical path setup, and wavelength resource control and link switching between OPS and OCS for the efficient use of resources. Our onboard optical packet header processor is capable of 16-bit longest prefix matching by embedding a 0.6W (5% of TCAM technology on the same condition), 200 million search-per-second (equivalent to 100 Gbps) forwarding engine LSI, and a statistical memory LSI for retaining the statistical information of processed headers. Reactive control automatically selects a packet or circuit link according to the statistical traffic information from the header processor and works with signaling for optical paths. We present an experimental demonstration of a new control system using a previously developed OPCInet testbed.

The wavelength conversion is regarded as an effective way to resolve the optical packet contention in the wavelength domain for optical packet switching. An optical packet switching node, based on shared-per-node equipped with limited range wavelength converters and parametric wavelength converters (SPN-LP), is designed to further reduce optical packet loss probability. A novel optical packet contention resolution with priority differentiation wavelength scheduling algorithm to support quality of service (QoS) for the SPN-LP architecture is put forward in the article. The simulation results show that proposed optical packet resolution enables a good QoS differentiation, namely the high priority contending optical packet has the sufficient low packet loss probability.

We propose and implement an enhanced moving average (MA) based dynamic resource allocation method for optical packet and circuit integrated (OPCI) networks. In the OPCI networks, optical packet switching (OPS) and optical circuit switching (OCS) share the total bandwidth in a fiber by allocating separate wavelength resources to them. In this work, we leverage an exponential moving average (EMA) as an enhanced MA. Every time a signaling process for path establishment or release occurs at a node, the proposed method employs the EMA of number of in-use paths to reallocate wavelengths to OCS and OPS while the conventional method employs the absolute number of in-use paths. When the EMA reaches or becomes less than a threshold value, the dynamic resource allocation is executed. As results of simulations and a verification experiment, we show that the proposed method can reduce the amount of routing processes without suffering from blocking of path establishments in comparison to the conventional method. In addition, it is expected that the proposed method can effectively allocate vaster amount of bandwidth to OPS without suffering from the blocking and achieve better system performances for OPS.

The paper presents the Multi-Service Photonic Network (MSPN) architecture, implementing the idea of optical circuit, burst and packet switching coexistence. We focus on the architecture using a layered perspective, and describe each layer functionality and technical implementation. Generic node structure gives a systematic description of MSPN functionalities through switching elements and transport interfaces. The implementation of new switching paradigms is particularly addressed by the discussion of the ways of transporting possibilities of optical packet/burst switching services over optical circuit switching services optical packet/burst. The MSPN support of different topological paradigms is of essential importance for the next generation optical transmission network deployment.

We describe the design of Internet Protocol (IP) buffers for optical packet switches. We show that slow light delay lines and ring resonator arrays show potential, but a number of key challenges remain.

Since the underlying demand for network capacity can be satisfied only by extremely increasing transmission bit rate, processing speed, and switching capacity, it definitely will lead to increased power consumption of network nodes. Energy crisis is global crisis nowadays and it has brought up many problems. Power consumption is becoming a crucial issue in designing high-performance network devices. This paper studies the power consumption model of a kind of Optical Packet Switching (OPS) node based on Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers (SOA). Our results show that by dynamically adjusting the bias current of SOAs, the power consumption on an OPS node can be reduced considerably, especially when the traffic distribution across multiple ports is not balanced and inter-nodal distances vary. The total electrical power consumption can be cut off significantly. We also show the power consumption can be further reduced by jointly optimizing the thermoelectric cooler current.

Since the underlying demand for network capacity can be satisfied only by extremely increasing transmission bit rate, processing speed, and switching capacity, it definitely will lead to increased power consumption of network nodes. Energy crisis is global crisis nowadays and it has brought up many problems. Power consumption is becoming a crucial issue in designing high-performance network devices. This paper studies the power consumption model of a kind of Optical Packet Switching (OPS) node based on Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers (SOA). Our results show that by dynamically adjusting the bias current of SOAs, the power consumption on an OPS node can be reduced considerably, especially when the traffic distribution across multiple ports is not balanced and inter-nodal distances vary. The total electrical power consumption can be cut off significantly. We also show the power consumption can be further reduced by jointly optimizing the thermoelectric cooler current.

We are developing an optical packet and circuit integrated network. When a process of lightpath establishment or release fails due to discarding of signaling packets on the network, some nodes are burdened with undesired optical path-connections remaining in themselves. It is possible that our conventional system requires a long time to eliminate such an incomplete lightpath. In this paper, we propose and implement a novel autonomous distributed control for elimination of incomplete lightpaths. In our proposed system, lightpath refreshing messages are generated and transferred by means of the same procedure as signaling. Thereby, when a lightpath establishment or release fails, any nodes can recognize the failures at about the same time because the sender does not transmit lightpath refreshing messages. As a result, the time required to eliminate incomplete lightpaths can be reduced, and furthermore the proposed system is sufficiently robust. Besides, our proposed signaling function is properly interlocked with a dynamic resource-adjustment control, and thus the status of usage of lightpaths in the network can automatically recover.

Modeling and performance analysis of a data center network (DCN) combining optical packet switching (OPS) and agile optical circuit switching (OCS) in a unified platform are presented. Hybrid optoelectronic packet routers which combine optical switching fabric and electronic buffers are used, supporting 100 Gbit/s (25 Gbit/s × 4 wavelengths) optical packets. OCS transmission is implemented by a novel “express path,” (ExP) an instant wavelength path on demand, which enables certain flows following the ExP with no packet contention, whereas ordinary OPS packets are switched with a deflection routing algorithm and buffering for contention resolution. This architecture can support OCS for large and reliability-sensitive data transferring and OPS for latency-sensitive applications. The performance of the network is investigated via numerical simulations of top-of-rack switch (ToR)-to-ToR traffic in an N-dimensional (up to 4096 node) torus topology. We have made the following observations: 1) torus topology results in high throughput and can be scaled out by increasing the dimension; 2) contention resolution between OPS and agile OCS is needed and our proposed strategies enhance the overall performance; and 3) in a lightly to moderately loaded case of OPS traffic, more than 100 ExPs can be supported simultaneously with acceptable affect on OPS.

This paper provides a short overview of 5G fronthaul transport and analyses the opportunity of using a new generation of SBVT (Sliceable Bandwidth Variable Transceivers), for this purpose.

Moving boundary between wavelength resources in optical packet and circuit integrated ring network

Multiwavelength optical packet and circuit integrated (OPCI) networks featured by the agile wavelength resource adjustment have been developed. With quick adjustment of wavelength resource, e.g., in emergency cases like disasters, the capacity of optical packet switching (OPS) portion of OPCI network where is closed to the disaster area can be extended quickly first so as to accommodate the significantly increased packet traffic. Here, we are motivated to investigate the efficient way for taking advantage of the emergently extended wavelength resource (for OPS) in the most congested part of the OPCI core network (i.e., outside of but close to the disaster area). In this paper we propose a waveband (WB) assignment scheme for multiwavelength-based OPS network which mixes the dedicated WBs and shared WBs assignment to isolate the heavy traffic flows as many as possible, and minimize the packet congestion efficiently. Simulation results reveal that our proposal can significantly reduce the packet loss, hence enhance the robustness of OPCI networks in emergency situations.

For dynamic traffic change on packet/lightpath integration, all-bandwidth amplifiers and high dynamic-range packet receivers are developed. 80-Gbit/s colored optical packets and 8-lightpaths simultaneous 170-km field transmission are demonstrated.