The “OPORON” Project: Demonstration of a Fully Functional End-To-End Asynchronous Optical Packet Switched Network

This paper presents the outcomes of the UK national OPORON project, which demonstrated an asynchronous end-to-end optical packet switched network. Several novel techniques and subsystems for optical packet switched network are analysed and described in details and their functionalities are validated through a demonstrator. The demonstrated network comprises two wavelength agile edge routers with traffic shaping capability, a fully controlled core router with wavelength conversion capability and a control plane. The OPORON edge router incorporates a novel traffic aggregation method, asynchronous optical packet transceiver and agile wavelength allocation mechanism. The OPORON core router is based on the wavelength conversion and selection architecture. It utilises a semiconductor optical amplifier based Mach-Zehnder interferometer wavelength converter, in combination with an agile tuneable wavelength source and an arrayed waveguide grating, for performing packet switching. The core router also, utilises an advanced and fully controllable mechanism for the packet switch control, which is implemented on field programmable gate array technology. Finally, the integration of the aforementioned subsystems is discussed, and the results of a complete and end-to-end asynchronous and variable length optical packet switched demonstrator are presented.