Abstract

Research into high-capacity all-optical networking has produced a plethora of architectural proposals¹ and has received added impetus from the activity surrounding the development of information superhighways. In this paper a novel proposal is made for the creation of a regular wavelength-routed re-configurable optical transport network (OTN), which could form the core network for a future U.K. National Information Infrastructure. This OTN is formed by embedding the regular structure into the fiber routes of the physical network. Network nodes consist of fiber-flexibility points, where fibers either can be connected to a wavelength-space switch, similar in concept to that being developed by the RACE R2028 project,² or can be statically routed through the node in order to physically connect distant nodes. The two regular structures examined for this study were a 32-node hypercube and a torus, shown in Figs. 1(a) and 1(b), respectively.

© 1995 Optical Society of America