Ultrafast photonic self-routing

Ultrafast packet techniques and network architectures are being developed to meet the expected future demand for connectionless services supporting bursty data traffic with high instantaneous bandwidth and ultra-low latency. We are devising network architectures that allow connectionless routing of ultrafast packets. The buffers used for contention resolution are confined to the edge of the network, close to users. This avoids the need for large buffers within the optical network, and in some designs also allows the end-to-end network delay to be quantified by the user at the instant of transmission