Highly scalable optical -label switching network systems incorporating label swapping and optical regeneration

The remarkable growth of Internet traffic over the last decade has spurred research and development into scalable optical networking systems that can deliver high-speed data over long transmission distances across a large number of switching nodes. Soon after the combination of dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM), optical amplification and advanced modulation technologies successfully accommodated the capacity growth demands, optical switching technology that can efficiently operate at packet-level granularity has become a research focus. Optical-label switching (OLS) technology combines the advantages of mature electrical logic processing and wide-band optical switching and transmission. Thus, it offers intelligent, packet-awareness optical networking with high-throughput and low-latency.;This dissertation pursues system-level investigations to realize a highly scalable optical-label switching network system. The problem is investigated with an approach that separates the label processing in the control plane and the payload regeneration in the data plane. In the control plane, all-optical label swapping technologies have been proposed, theoretically investigated, and experimentally demonstrated to facilitate the scaling of the topology of the OLS networks and to avoid the complexity of OIE/O conversions of high-speed data payloads. The data plane research focused on payload regeneration technologies that can overcome physical impairments from fiber transmission and all-optical switching. Optical 3R regeneration (re-amplification, reshaping, and retiming) technologies with all-optical clock recovery have been proposed and experimentally demonstrated to achieve system cascadability up to 10,000 hops over 1,250,000 km fiber transmission. Finally, experiments have successfully demonstrated the integration of the proposed control and data plane technologies in OLS network testbeds. A field trial experiment is also discussed to evaluate the system in a relatively practical situation. With the ongoing technology development efforts, highly scalable optical-label switching technology will become a promising candidate for the next generation optical Internet.