Hybrid adaptation layers for high-performance optical packet switched IP networks

With the increasing demand for network bandwidth, today's electronic routers struggle to keep up and are fast reaching their physical limitations. All-Optical packet switching offers an alternative approach to forwarding traffic by keeping the payload in the optical domain throughout the network while forwarding is done based solely on the optical header. Advantages of such an approach include a scalable increase in payload bit rate, packet forwarding rate and reduction in power consumption and physical size.; Current research in optics has yielded several integrated and non-integrated technologies leading towards all-optical packet forwarding. Research on an adaptation mechanism that achieves complete payload and frame decoupling and thereby enabling direct IP over optics packet forwarding has however been limited. Additionally, core packet forwarding involves statistical multiplexing of packet traffic. Contention is a major issue during statistical multiplexing and has been conventionally solved using Random Access Memory (RAM) buffers in electronics. In the absence of Optical RAMs, a new technique of handling contention using fixed length delay lines as buffering is required. This thesis focuses on research of a new optical framing mechanism that enables all-optical statistical demultiplexing of IP over optics at the core and optical processing mechanisms such as packet compression and decompression to enable all-optical packet forwarding by statistical multiplexing at the network core. Research on efficient adaptation of slow speed IP traffic at the edge to enable and improve forwarding at the high speed optical core is presented in this work.