Optical IP Switching for Dynamic Traffic Engineering in Next-Generation Optical Networks

WDM technology has increased network link capacity dramatically, moving the network bottleneck from the transport to the routing layer. Hybrid electro-optical architectures seem at the moment a reliable and cost-effective solution for near-future implementations of the routing/switching layer. In this paper we present a novel approach to dynamic optical circuit switching based on the Optical IP Switching (OIS) model. OIS nodes classify IP packets by destination prefix, aggregating them into dynamically created optical paths. We report simulation results based on real traffic traces collected from the panEuropean GÈANT network.