Search

This paper presents a new passive optical network (PON) architecture that applies an optical multicast capable switch (OMS) to direct wavelengths to a set of PON branches and enables them to share the transceivers in the central office (CO) on demand. The OMS is composed of fiber splitters and switching gates, and by controlling the on-off gates the wavelengths at the inputs can reach any outputs of the OMS. Through the OMS configuration, logical PONs are dynamically formed according to changing traffic patterns, and traffic is further scheduled in the time domain within each logical PON. The proposed network achieves network resource sharing without requiring tunable transceivers or wavelength filters, and without changing deployed network devices in the field or at the user end. Analysis and experimental study results show the efficiency of resource sharing and demonstrate the concept of resource sharing among PON branches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses merits and drawbacks of the Optical Burst Switching (OBS) paradigm, which received so much attention by the academic research community. Since the topic is hot, and given the several flavors of OBS available in the literature, we first define what we mean by OBS. Then, we carefully design a reference scenario and a set of evaluation experiments that can be used to obtain quantitative answers to interesting questions in a repeatable way. Within this framework, we motivate our skepticism towards two frequent assertions about the OBS paradigm: its ability to (i) exploit the network bandwidth more efficiently than Optical Circuit Switching (OCS) alternatives, and (ii) to efficiently solve contentions without optical buffers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]