Design of a 100Tb/s Multicast-capable Optical Packet Router (Invited)

Abstract

The capacity of today’s top-end core routers is only about 1Tb/s. If the router capacity were to continue to grow at the same rate as the past 20 years, we would need 100Tb/s routers by 2012. The two major projects that aim to design plain 100Tb/s packet routers are LASOR and IRIS. In our project, we aim to design a multicast capable 100Tb/s packet and an integrated platform for optical packet switching and wavelength routing. We will describe the router architecture, the integrated platform, and selected enabling technologies we have developed and experimentally demonstrated, which include a high speed switch fabric with high port counts, an optical packet label swapping technique, an optical loop buffer design, and a wavelength multicasting structure.