Burst Switching Metro-Access Ring Integrated Network

Driven by the aggressive progress of optical access network development and deployment, we envision that the bandwidth upgrade in the metro-area network (MAN) will take place in the near future. Instead of upgrading the system performance independently in the metro and access networks, we propose a highly integrated metro-access network - the metro-access ring integrated network (MARIN). With MARIN architecture, the optical access network is integrated into MAN, such that the capacity upgrade in both networks can be achieved simultaneously without interfering the operation of existing MAN system. By interconnecting multiple access ring networks, all-optical path can be formed to route the MAN traffic between any metro hubs connected to MARIN. Fast tunable lasers are used in the central office of each access ring network to form a hybrid TDM/WDM access network architecture, and facilitate resource sharing, desirable network scalability, and routing efficiency of the metro traffic, which is the focus of this paper. wavelength routed optical burst switching (WR-OBS) is employed for route management of metro traffic. In MARIN, each access ring network emulates a distributed optical burst switch, controlled by the local central office. With WR-OBS for bandwidth and route allocation, the simulation results show that using multiple tunable lasers for simultaneous burst transmission and high-speed reconfigurable device at the joint node, the network performance of MARIN can be significantly improved.