Implementation of Burstponder Card for Ethernet Grooming in Light-trail WDM Networks

A light-trail is a generalization of a lightpath such that multiple nodes can take part in communication along the path. A light-trail is a good candidate for optical layer traffic grooming. In this paper we investigate the grooming aspect of light-trails from a sub-system perspective. We introduce a new sub-system called burstponder card that enables efficient grooming of traffic in a light-trail. We describe the implementation of the burstponder card using FPGA and burst-mode optics. We show experiment results on efficiency and latency for a 4-node light-trail network demonstrating it as an effective solution for optical grooming.