Study and Development of Next-Generation Optical Networks

Abstract

Next-generation optical networks are expected to provide tremendous capacity in order to support upcoming traffic increases. Many technologies are currently being developed for optical transport networks in order to increase throughput, improve energy efficiency and simplify network deployment. The most important problem in current optical networks is transmission of Internet protocol (IP) traffic. Regardless of the tremendous throughput with optical fibers, switching nodes still limit overall network performance. Recently, optical burst switching technology has been developed to overcome this problem. Optical burst switching combines the advantages of both circuit switching and packet switching networks and provides good performance in terms of packet data transmission. Even though optical burst switching networks provide a good mechanism for IP traffic transmission, overall performance is still limited because of access networks. Existing passive optical networks based on Ethernet technology are not fully compatible with optical burst switching, which results in bottlenecks on the border between transport and access networks. In this paper, we present a new method of optical wavelength time-division multiple access (OWTDMA) for passive optical networks. The proposed approach can provide outstanding scalability of network resources and can increase throughput of the optical access network. In addition, we propose implementation of OWTDMA in edge nodes of optical burst switching networks to eliminate bottlenecks between transport and access networks. Simulation results prove the advantage of our proposed approach.