Purely optical networks for terabit communication

Emerging applications require a substantially higher bandwidth than the one offered by current networks. The authors propose a novel architectural approach that meets the high bandwidth requirements by introducing a communication architecture based on lightpaths, which are purely optical transmission paths in the network. Since lightpaths form the building block of the proposed architecture, its performance hinges on their efficient establishment and management. The authors shown that although the problem of optimally establishing lightpaths is NP-complete, distributed heuristics provide near-optimal solutions for several of the basic problems presented by the lightpath architecture