Design considerations for photonic routers supporting application-driven bandwidth reservations at sub-wavelength granularity

This paper presents hybrid optical router architectures (both edge and core) to support user-defined bandwidth reservations for emerging and evolving applications over wavelength channels (circuit), optical bursts or even optical packets. The edge router is based on the deployment of application-aware IP packet classification and burst/packet aggregation algorithms as well as agile and intelligent optical resource allocation. The mechanism is responsible for per application switching (OCS/OBS/OPS) service selection and Differentiated Service (DiffServ) provisioning. The optical core router can support all the abovementioned switching technologies. Both are generic and able to support any type of current or future application.