Introduction to Optical Router

Fiber optical cables and technologies carry data at the speed of light over the internet. In the recent years, optical technology will be used more and more in the routers for serial links, switch fabrics, backplanes and chip-to-chip communications. Optical routers are based on the optical switching techniques and they include the optical wavelength switching, optical packet switching and optical burst switching.  
 

Cisco has introduced the 7600 optical services router that provides the IP services at the optical speed i.e. the speed of light. An optical router uses the NxN frequency router and N tunable transmitters. Data packets are routed according to their required destinations. 

Optical switching and optical signal processing technologies create a very intelligent and versatile optical router. Routing is performed by determining the indented destination of the packets to be routed. An OR is comprised of the followings.

• Frequency router having plurality of input ports and plurality of output ports.
• Plurality of transmitters.
• Plurality of tunable lasers that is coupled with the plurality of the modulators.
• Transmitter
• Polarization controller that is coupled between the plurality of the transmitters and the plurality of the input ports.
• Clock, that provides the signals to the transmitters and receivers.
• Scheduler that is coupled with the transmitter.

The Cisco 7600 OSR allows the services providers to create the high speed and value added services to meet the customers’ requirements and for the high speed networks. The services are voice and video convergence, internet based applications and the network-based security.  It consists of 256Gbps switching fabrics and forwarding engine that forwards 30 million packets per second.
It can provide different IP services at a very higher speed. Optical wavelengths are the true building blocks of the next generation high speed networking. OR are still in research and many vendors are experimenting it.  In the near future, OR will revolutionized the IP communications.
Common Advantages of the OS includes the following.

• Very high throughout.
• Multicast capability.
• Low latency.
• Rapid routing.
• Interoperability with the today’s circuit switching network.
• High speed data transmission (at the speed of light).