Blazenet: a packet-switched wide-area network with photonic data path

AbstmctHigh-performance wide-area networks are required to interconnect clusters of computers connected by local area and metropolitan area networks. Optical fiber technology provides long distance channels in the multigigabit per second range. The challenge is to provide switching nodes that handle these data rates with minimum delay, and at a reasonable cost. In this paper, we describe a packet-switching network with photonic data path, christened Blazenet,’ that provides low delay and has minimal memory requirements. It can be extended to support multicast and priority delivery. Such a network can revolutionize the opportunities for distributed command and control, information and resources sharing, real-time conferencing, and wide-area parallel computation.