A high speed network interface card for optical burst switched networks

Optical burst switching (OBS) is emerging as an optical networking technology combining best of the features of optical circuit-switching technology and optical packet-switching technology. This paper discusses architecture and hardware implementation of a network interface card (NIC) for an OBS network. The NIC implements a specific low-latency signaling protocol just-in-time (JlT) for OBS networks. This NIC can handle data streams up to 1 Gbps. Average OBS JIT signaling message processing time with this NIC is on the order of 1 microsecond. This is the first JIT OBS NIC implementation known to the authors. Complementary efforts are on-going to develop other elements for the OBS network.