A Deterministic Ultra-Low-Latency Fiber Transport Architecture for High-Capacity Real-Time Communication Systems

Abstract

Professional real-time audio transport systems require deterministic latency, sample-accurate synchronization, high channel capacity, and predictable network behavior while maintaining extremely low processing delay. Existing synchronous transport technologies provide deterministic operation but offer limited architectural flexibility and limited extensibility for future services. This paper presents a deterministic ultra-low-latency streaming transport architecture for professional optical audio networks implemented over an 8G Fibre Channel physical layer. The proposed system employs a fixed Streaming Transport Frame synchronized to the audio sampling period together with a Streaming Forwarding Pipeline implementing cut-through forwarding without packet buffering, dynamic routing, or queue management. The transport architecture supports 768 channels of 32-bit PCM audio sampled at 192 kHz while maintaining a deterministic forwarding latency of approximately 115–185 ns per transport node. Audio transport, synchronization, management information, and auxiliary communication are integrated within a single Deterministic Timing Domain through fixed-position Audio Slots, configurable Hybrid Slots, and dedicated Service Tunnels. Analytical latency modeling demonstrates that forwarding latency depends exclusively on the depth of the deterministic hardware pipeline and is independent of both frame length and transported channel count. The overall network latency is dominated by light propagation in the optical fiber, a solid-state dielectric medium with highly stable refractive properties, which guarantees deterministic timing across the network. The proposed architecture establishes a scalable foundation for next-generation deterministic professional audio transport while preserving identical forwarding principles for future higher-speed physical-layer implementations.