Subject: RE: (ION) Optical routing

From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2000 11:16:13 -0400

Fred Baker wrote:

> Maybe I'm missing something; I often feel that I am. Placing 
> electrically-represented packets into a queue appropriate to 
> a lambda is no 
> different than placing them into a queue by traffic class.

Or on a pre-existing ATM PVCs (or SPVCs), or SONET pipes, or any other
tunnel. Is this what you mean? I agree with you that as long as colors are
used just like these other examples of long-term pipes, those same solutions
should work. And that in principle, the inter-optical network hops might be
done photonically.

> So we most 
> certainly can select wavelengths on some variation of a 
> per-packet basis. 
> What is difficult to do, with today's technology, is to 
> arbitrarily select 
> a packet out of a lambda and change its color to an arbitrary 
> other color 
> without capturing all of the packets in a lambda and throwing 
> them into 
> electrical queues.

It's also difficult to build the lambda-differentiated routes on the fly, as
packets arrive at the ingress. Just as it is difficult to achieve that in
ATM, not so? I think that tunnels available long-term, such as those
mentioned above, bypass a lot of complexity.

I don't consider SONET ADMs to be "routers," so I find that term misleading
when applied to these optical "routers" as well.

> So it seems like we could just as easily replicate the light beam to 
> various outputs and color them appropriately to their 
> outputs.

If there were as many colors available as IP addresses, or if colors could
be mapped real-time to one (or more) IP address just for the duration of an
IP session, then reassigned, that's what I would consider to be optical
routing.

Bert
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---

From: [email-masked] (Michel Vanden Bossche)
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 09:28:02 +0200

On Mon, 25 Sep 2000, Albert Manfredi wrote:

> ... or if colors could

Could that be a resurgence of IFMP and GSMP, switching "flows" (in the
data plane) instead of preconfiguring "paths" in the control plane?

Michel Vanden Bossche
Mission Critical