Implementation and modeling of a scheduled Optical Flow Switching (OFS) network

In this thesis we present analysis of Optical Flow Switching (OFS), an architectural approach for enabling all-optical user to user connections for transmission of Internet traffic. We first describe a demonstration of OFS on the ONRAMP test environment which is a MAN optical network implemented in hardware in the Boston geographic area. This demonstration shows the viability of OFS in an actual implementation, with good performance results and an assessment over OFS overheads. Then, we use stochastic models to quantify the behavior of an OFS network. Strong quantitative evidence leads us to draw the conclusion that scheduling is a necessary component of any architectural approach to implementing OFS in a Metro Area network (MAN). Thesis Supervisor: Professor Vincent Chan Title: Joan and Irwin Jacobs Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department