Quality-of-Service Encoding Scheme for Optical Packet-Switched Fabrics

The future Internet architecture will require a clean-slate design in order to successfully accommodate the exploding bandwidth demand. Next-generation networking applications should support a bidirectional cross-layer information exchange in which the physical-layer performance, characteristics, and impairments can be extracted for higher-layer routing decisions. The dynamic cross-layer mechanisms should further be aware of the packet’s quality-of-service (QoS). By invoking QoS requirements and classes directly on the optical physical layer, the end-to-end network performance may be optimized [2]. The architecture should also exploit optical packet-switched (OPS) fabrics as a low-latency, highbandwidth approach to switch optical messages with low power. Embedding QoS guarantees on the physical layer through QoS and priority levels may constitute an important requirement for achieving significant performance gains within the scope of broadband message routing. An optimal coding protocol must be designed and experimentally implemented to demonstrate the feasibility of creating QoS-aware routing of optical packets.