| The Internet continues to grow exponentially with rapidly emerging new services and applications. While the capacity growth demand has been successfully met by advanced multi-wavelength optical communication technologies exploiting huge bandwidth in optical fibers, the optical switching and routing functions have not kept up with the diverse service and application demands. To meet the demand, optical networks needs a paradigm shift to supporting Internet Protocol directly over the dense-wavelength-division-multiplexing optical transmission layer.; The optical-label switching technology offers high-throughput, low-latency, and agile optical networking with the support of circuit, burst, and packet switching. The separation of the electrical control plane and the all-optical data plane brings multifold benefits. Optical-label switching takes advantage of the mature, low-cost, and functionally rich electrical technology while fully utilizing the large bandwidth of the optical technology. The transparent data plane enables interoperability with other network protocols. The inherent packet-switching capability provides direct support for Internet Protocol, which, together with the optical label, gives optical-label switching the flexibility to meet the demand of tomorrow's multi-service networks.; This work presents a rapidly tunable wavelength converter based optical-label switching router test bed that builds upon several enabling optical technologies, such as the widely tunable semiconductor lasers, the monolithically integrated Mach-Zehnder interferometer wavelength converters, and the arrayed waveguide grating routers. With the intelligence delivered by the electrical switch controller and the all-optical signal processing, the realized optical-label switching router performs effective contention resolution for variable-length packets in the wavelength, time, and space domains. The introduction of optical 3R regeneration (reamplification, reshaping, and retiming) enables many-hop cascaded operations with all-optical label swapping, leading toward a scalable network. In addition, a novel optical-layer multicast architecture is proposed and demonstrated, allowing support for a function required in numerous modern network applications. The end-to-end simultaneous unicast and multicast video streaming demonstration across the optical-label switching core router and edge routers verifies from the network layer that the complete optical-label switching system is functioning as designed.; With ongoing technology advances and development effort, optical-label switching technology will play an important role in the next generation optical Internet. |
