Demonstration of an agile hybrid IP-optical packet construction mechanism in wavelength routed optical packet switched networks

This letter presents a novel architecture for an ingress edge OPS router and demonstrates a mechanism that maps internet traffic onto optical packets. The architecture utilises a high-speed reconfigurable hardware platform and a fast tuneable laser and also supports the user network interface (UNI) functionality by fully interacting with the physical and higher network layers. The main design issues, including wavelength agility, traffic aggregation based on the class of service and variable length optical packet construction and transmission are also discussed.