A novel optical burst mesh network with optical time slot interchange at source nodes

In this paper, we propose an optical burst network architecture supporting the generic mesh topology. The intermediate node architecture of the mesh network can be the same with current wavelength switching Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) networks, and thus can reuse existing deployed infrastructure. We employ a novel Optical Time Slot Interchange (OTSI) at the source nodes for the first time to mitigate the burst contention and to increase the bandwidth utilization. Time- and wavelength-domain reuse in the OTSI significantly saves optical components and reduces blocking probability.