Design, Simulation and FPGA Implementation of a Novel Router for Bulk Flow TCP in Optical IP Networks

Architecture of a novel optical router is designed in RTL and implemented in FPGA for the use of bulk flow TCP in optical IP networks. Various functional blocks of optical router like fabrication of flow from the incoming packets, processing the flow for routing process, contention resolution, buffering the packet or flow based on the wavelength and channel availability and transmission of the flow for destination have been successfully designed in RTL and implemented in FPGA. The numbers of slices utilized by various flow stages have also been simulated. The proposed optical router is tested for its performance in terms of frequency of operation and the area of utilization by various functional units. We have also implemented the central control unit for this optical router. From the observation it is found that in steady state, the optical router for bulk flow TCP exhibits better performance in terms of congestion behavior and wavelength aware flow to form a global optical network infrastructure. Index Terms Bulk flow TCP, contention resolution, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), Optical packet switching (OPS), Time-To-Live (TTL), variable-sized packets, wavelength conversion, Optical router.