Burst Switching System Using Optical Cross-Connect as Switch Fabric
AssigneeNEC Laboratories America, Inc.
InventorsJunqiang Hu, Philip Nan Ji, Ting Wang, Yawei Yin
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Abstract
A switching system includes one or more line card for input processing, forwarding, queuing, and scheduling data, the line card having a tunable laser to select a wavelength according to the packets' destination for a given burst of packets, so that the burst is switched to a desired destination and sent all-optically to a connected interface; an all-optical switch fabric coupled to the line card to perform wavelength switching; and a centralized arbitrator that resolves the contention from different input ports.
Claims20
A switching system, comprising:
- one or more line card for input processing, forwarding, queuing, and scheduling data, the line card having a tunable laser to select a wavelength according to the packets' destination for a given burst of packets, so that the burst is switched to a desired destination and sent all-optically to a connected interface;
- an all-optical switch fabric coupled to the line card to perform wavelength switching;
- and
- a centralized arbitrator to resolve contention from different input ports.
The source port has sub-scheduling to distribute the granted bandwidth to different queues
The arbitrator grants the fabric access in a way that uses the allocated bandwidth between the source and destination as the weight
The line cards and the arbitrator/switch-fabric are located in different systems
The request/grant is sent from either a separate cable or a different wavelength from the one carrying the data
The output network interface is connected to the fabric system
The output network interface is connected to the line card system, paired with the input interface
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.