4K uncompressed streaming over OPS

A field trial of 4K uncompressed streaming over 80 (8λ x 10) Gbps colored optical packet switching network with SOA based broadcast-and-select switch and stacked optical-code (OC) label processing is reviewed. Introduction “4K” motion pictures (3840x2048 pixels), which is 4 times pixel counts of high-definition (HD), are promising imaging technology for digital cinema, computer visualization, and medical applications. Uncompressed streaming of 4K motion pictures requires about 6 Gbps but enables us to share the image over networks with lossless quality in real-time manner. The feasibility of 4K uncompressed streaming over IP network has been demonstrated in these years [1]. Because of its high bandwidth, real-time point-tomultipoint transmission with high-speed switching capability of uncompressed 6Gbps 4k motion pictures still remains a challenge. Optical packet switching (OPS) is a very attractive technology to realize such high bandwidth, low latency, and fine granularity for high-performance computer networks. Recently, many different OPS schemes have been developed to route and forward IP packets directly in the optical domain [2-4]. However, it is difficult to realize OPS system because practical optical buffers are not available. Recently, we have proposed and demonstrated the multicast-capable variable bandwidth colored packet switching using the semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) based broadcast-and-select switch and the stacked optical-code (OC) label processing [5]. It enables to reduce the latency and simplify the control of complicate switching, scheduling and optical buffering because its payload time length is fixed. On the other hand, one real issue is how to connect such high-speed OPS networks and current networks based on Internet protocol (IP) technology. To provide the effective scheme and the device accommodating IP packets into over-40-Gbit/s optical packets in network edge nodes, the layer-3 IP switches (called as IP-OP or OP-IP converters) as interfaces between 80 Gbit/s OPS networks and 10 Gbit/s Ethernet (10GbE) have been developed [3]. In this paper, we introduce a field trial of 4K uncompressed streaming over multicast-capable 80 (8λ x 10) Gbps colored optical packet switching network using SOA based broadcast-and-select switch and stacked OClabel processing. Architecture of Multicast-Capable Colored Optical Packet Switching Network Figure 1 shows the multicast-capable colored optical packet switching network using SOA based broadcastand-select switch and stacked OC-label processing. The switching node mainly consists of optical switches and optical label processor (Fig.1a). In the optical switch, the broadcast-and-select architecture is adopted using SOA switch array [6]. This architecture is suitable for optical multicasting. In addition, it takes advantage of the gain of the SOA switches to compensate the optical signal losses due to the power splitting. Figure 1b shows a configuration of colored optical packet format. It consists of the fixed-length colored payload bundling several WDM links and the stacked OC-label. It enables to reduce the latency and simplify the control of contention resolution as compared with variable length packets. Colored packets are forwarded based on the routing information that the stacked OC-label has [7]. The stacked OC-label recognition is simultaneously achieved by the optical correlation using a multi-port decoder [8]. The stacked OC-label is also suitable for optical multicasting. Demonstration Figure 2 shows the setup of 4K uncompressed streaming over a multicast-capable colored optical packet switching network. 4 uncompressed HDTV-IP Gateways (XG-2s) [9] connected with a 4K playback system generate 6.4 Gbps 4K streaming data (1.6Gbps for each XG-2). The Ethernet frame length is 2,220 byte. For traffic monitoring, a PC-based server generates another 1.6 Gbps streaming data. These 8-Gbps signals are transmitted through 10Gbps virtual local area network (VLAN) of JGN2 plus [10] from Digital Media and Content, Keio University (DMC) to NICT.