| Due to the rapid growth of communication technology and Internet, human beings are entering the era of information. One of the key factors that incur this evolution is the great development of optical communication technology. The transmission capability of optical network has reached a high level with the development of a series of technology like DWDM. However, the switching capability in optical networks is still limited due to E/O/E conversion.Optical Packet Switching (OPS) is a promising technology in future. E/O and O/E conversion is done at edge nodes and the all-optical packets remain its physical form through the transmission. This eliminates the bottleneck of O/E/O conversion at core nodes and improves the performance of network. Generally, OPS networks are divided into two categories. One is synchronous OPS (SOPS) and the other is Asynchronous OPS (AOPS).In this thesis, we conducted a series of study in the field of OPS, with a focus on AOPS implementations and performance of AOPS header processing. Our work includes:1) Design and implementation of edge node communication protocol and interface of AOPS networks (Chapter 2),including optical packet format, data frame and control frame specifications, line coding and physical timing etc;2) Design and implementation of edge node assembly/disassembly module of AOPS networks (Chapter 3), including optical packet aggregation and splitting, word and channel alignment etc;3) Mathematical analysis and simulation about the packet loss incurred by header processing delay (Chapter 4). Our implementation and research provide useful insights into realizing AOPS networks. The data and experiences gained through our AOPS testbed can be very useful in future OPS research and implementations. We also find some useful disciplines on analyzing behaviors of core node while considering the header processing delay. Future work is also planned at the end of this thesis. |
