An Optical Booster for Internet Routers

Although optical technologies have been effectively employed to increase the capacity of communication links, it has proven difficult to apply these technologies towards increasing the capacity of Internet routers, which implement the central forwarding and routing functions of the Internet. Motivated by the need for future routers that will forward packets among several high-speed links, this work considers the design of an Internet router that can forward packets from a terabit-per-second link without internal congestion or packet loss. The router consists of an optical booster integrated with a conventional (mostly electronic) Internet router. The optical booster processes Internet Protocol packets analogously to the hosting router, but it can avoid the time-consuming lookup function and keep packets in an entirely optical format. An optically boosted router is an inexpensive, straightforward upgrade that can be deployed readily in a backbone IP network, and provides optical processing throughput even when not deployed ubiquitously.