Multihop lightwave networks: a new approach to achieve terabit capabilities

A multihop approach for achieving concurrency in distributed lightwave networks with hundreds or thousands of Gb/s throughput, even while the users are limited to rates of 1 Gb/s or lower, is described. Multihop networks avoid two serious drawbacks of standard multichannel approaches: the requirement of wavelength-agile transmitters or receivers, and pretransmission coordination between users wishing to communicate. Although transmitting a packet from one user to another may require routing the packet through intermediate network interface units, the approach´s connectivity is specifically designed to achieve efficient use of the channel bandwidth, allow modular growth of the network from small to large configurations, and provide a degree of network reliability.<>