A novel optical IP router architecture for WDM networks

Asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) is employed as the backbone for Internet to connect LAN or WAN. However, the IP packets need to be segmented and packaged due to the differences of format and length between IP packet and ATM cell. Therefore, it will increase the processing time and the complexity of the edge router. In this paper, we propose a novel optical IP router (OIR) architecture and switching concept to fast transmit IP packets in an optical network. The non-TDM based OIR employed genetic algorithms (GAs) with time stamps to support the switching of variable-length IP packets. By using the algorithm, we provide an efficient scheduling technique to cope the variable-length packets in non-TDM based environment.