| The demand for bandwidth in communication networks increases continuously. The World Wide Web application alone, for example, requires a yearly eightfold increase in bandwidth per user. All-optical networks, in which signals, once launched, remain in optical form until the destination is reached, may be the only solution to cope with this increasing bandwidth demand. Apart from a tremendous bandwidth and extremely low bit error rates, all-optical networks offer transparency, which enables both analog and digital services with varying formats, bit rates, and quality of service, in the same network.; This dissertation addresses the problem of increasing bandwidth demand in transport networks that range in geographical size from a metropolitan to a wide area network, have an irregular mesh topology, and operate under a time division multiplexing regime. The transport network shall offer transparent communication between arbitrary node pairs, and provide a flexible allocation of the available bandwidth to the capacity demands.; Architectures are defined for transport networks that are based on a novel approach, called Photonic Slot Routing (PSR). With PSR, entire time slots, each carrying multiple data-flows on distinct wavelength channels, are switched as a single unit, using fast and wavelength-insensitive devices. Algorithms are designed for computing transmission control schedules with the objective to maximize the network capacity. The performance of different networks based on the proposed network architectures and the associated scheduling algorithms is evaluated by means of theoretical analysis and software simulation modeling.; The proposed PSR-based transport network architectures are expected to form practical and sufficiently efficient solutions for achieving transparent communication with a flexible capacity assignment. The architectures use wavelength-insensitive switching nodes that are relatively simple and scalable in the number of wavelength channels. PSR-based transport network architectures can be upgraded with new devices as technology evolves, and provide a growth path to wavelength-sensitive TDM-based architectures, or possibly even to PSR-based optical packet-switching architectures. |
