Native digital processing for optical networking

The Optical Turing Machine (OTM) is an approach to digital optical processing that supports computation in the same format used for high-speed transmission. This paper identifies the key capabilities required to support native digital optical processing for typical in-network functions including forwarding, security, and filtering. Current analog and binary digital approaches - including optical transistors - are considered and shown insufficient for optical networks. The requirements for a single encoding are presented, as are the capabilities required for network computation.