Abstract

Multiwavelength optical networks of many forms that use wavelength to create concurrent network interconnections on passive optical media such as stars, buses, and rings have been proposed and in part demonstrated. These networks have virtually all suffered from the limitation of not being scalable to large numbers of access nodes. We describe how to overcome this limitation and to produce truly scalable and modular multiwavelength networks having capacities far surpassing that of star-based networks by the use of wavelength routing to produce maximal wavelength reuse, wavelength translation to reduce blocking, and multihop switching to provide packet based network access at gigabit-per-second rates. The result is network architecture in which the number of access nodes is independent of the number of wavelengths used.

© 1992 Optical Society of America