Optical Packet and Circuit Integrated Networks and Software Defined Networking Extension

An optical packet and circuit integrated network (OPCInet) provides both high-speed, inexpensive services and deterministic-delay, low-data-loss services according to the users´ usage scenarios, from the viewpoint of end users. From the viewpoint of network service providers, this network provides large switching capacity with low energy consumption, high flexibility, and efficient resource utilization with a simple control mechanism. This paper presents the recent progress made in the development of OPCInet and its extension to software-defined networking (SDN). We have developed OPCI nodes, which are capable of layer 3 switching from/to an Ethernet frame to/from an optical packet in the optical packet edge part and a burst-tolerant optical amplifier and an optical buffer with optical fiber delays in 100 Gbps optical packet switching part. The OPCI node achieves a packet error rate less than 10^-4 and is used as a node in a lab-network that has access to the Internet. A distributed automatic control works in a control plane for the circuit switching part and in a moving boundary control between optical packet resources and circuit resources. Our optical system for packet and circuit switching works with a centralized control mechanism as well as a distributed control mechanism. We have shown a packet-based SDN system that configures mapping between IP addresses and OPCI node identifiers and switching tables according to the requests from multiple service providers via a web interface.