A novel all-optical transport network with time-shared wavelength channels

High-speed and high-capacity transport networks are necessary for providing future broadband services and multimedia applications. Optical networks, such as wavelength-routed networks and optical switching networks, are the most popular solutions. However, the limited electronic switching capability constrains the scalability of the multihop wavelength routed networks, while the difficulty and complexity of implementing efficient optical buffers and optical contention resolution schemes constrains the development of optical switching networks. This paper proposes a new architecture for the optical transport networks based on time-wavelength-space routers (TWSRs). The TWSR is equipped without optical buffers and optical contention resolution devices. A connection is established by constructing a time-slot based lightpath (ts-lightpath) between source TWSR and destination TWSR. The paper also proposes a heuristic algorithm for the problem of establishing the set of efficient ts-lightpaths for a given set of connection requests. The effectiveness of the proposed network architecture with the heuristic algorithm is demonstrated by simulation.