Unified control infrastructure for carrier network evolution

Migration strategies for the network control infrastructure are discussed, to evolve carrier networks toward an optical transport backbone optimized for IP traffic. The strategies presented aim to protect carriers' investments in their current multiservice and IP-routed networks, while expediting the backbone migration toward a unified packet-over-optical core for IP and multiservice transport. This unified core network simplifies the network layers and control systems, and consolidates data and multiservice traffic to reduce network cost with improved bandwidth efficiency. The network control system, including signaling, addressing, and routing, is analyzed in detail to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed infrastructure. Built on multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) technology, the presented solutions take phased evolution steps to reduce network cost, improve bandwidth efficiency, and offer practical options for internetworking during the migration. These solutions provide carriers with competitive advantages to consolidate multiple services onto an IP-centric optical transport network. The unified control infrastructure not only offers flexible options for network upgrade with reduced network management overhead, but also supports enhanced networking and traffic engineering capabilities to ensure no compromise in the service level agreement committed to end customers.     

无线光互连技术发展综述

人们对无线宽带通信技术的需求在近些年稳步增长.无线电波频谱的带宽限制和频带拥堵,通过微波无线网络的发展已经有了明显的改善.然而,无线光互连技术才能使得数据传输带宽达到理想的要求.作为许多无线通讯系统的最终方案,无线光互连也被选择为长期的解决策略.并且,无线光互连的大量优势还没有得到完全的发掘,许多基础性和应用性的研究还需要在实验层面和商业应用层面加以深入.国外,Gb/s的无线光传输已经在实验室中得到了验证,然而,可用的室内无线光互连系统也仅仅达到了155Mb/s的速度.下面将着重从收发系统、性能及安全性方面对无线光互连技术作一概况阐述.     

基于智能手机平台的计算光学显微成像技术研究综述

计算光学显微成像技术将光学编码和计算解码相结合,通过光学操作和图像算法重建来恢复微观物体的多维信息,为显微成像技术突破传统成像能力提供了强大的助力。这项技术的发展得益于现代光学系统、图像传感器以及高性能数据处理设备的优化,同时也被先进的通信技术和设备的发展所赋能。智能手机平台作为高度集成化的电子设备,具有先进的图像传感器和高性能的处理器,可以采集光学系统的图像并运行图像处理算法,为计算光学显微成像技术的实现创造了全新的方式。进一步地,作为可移动通信终端,智能手机平台开放的操作系统和多样的无线网络接入方法,赋予了显微镜灵活智能化操控能力与丰富的显示和处理分析功能,可用于实现各种复杂环境下多样化的生物学检测应用。文中从四个方面综述了基于智能手机平台的计算光学显微成像技术,首先综述了智能手机平台作为光学成像器件的新型显微成像光路设计,接下来介绍了基于智能手机平台先进传感器的计算光学高通量显微成像技术,然后介绍了智能手机平台的数据处理能力和互联能力在计算显微成像中的应用,最后讨论了这项技术现存在的一些问题及解决方向。     

Breakthrough technologies for the high-performance electrical ATMswitching system

A high-performance electrical asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switching system is described with the goal of Tb/s ATM switching. The first step system was to use advanced Si-bipolar very large scale integrated (VLSI) technologies and the multichip technique. 1.0 μm bipolar SST technologies and Cu-polyimide multilayer MCM realized a 160 Gb/s throughput ATM system. The performance limitations of the 160 Gb/s system were power supply/cooling and module interconnection. The new ATM switching system, named OPTIMA-1, adopted optical interconnection/distribution to overcome the limitations and achieve 640 Gb/s. The system uses high-performance complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) devices and optical wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) interconnection. Combining OPTIMA-1 with optical cell-by-cell routing functions, i.e., photonic packet routing, can realize variable bandwidth links for 5 Tb/s ATM systems. This paper first reviews high-performance electrical ATM (packet) switching system architecture and hardware technologies. In addition, system limitations are described. Next, the important breakthrough technology of optical WDM interconnection is highlighted. These technologies are adopted to form OPTIMA-1, a prototype of which is demonstrated. The key technologies of the system are advanced 80 Gb/s CMOS/MCM, electrical technologies, and 10 Gb/s, 8 WDM, 8×8 optical interconnection. Details of implementation technologies are also described. Optical cell-by-cell (packet-by-packet) routing is now being studied. From the architectural viewpoint, dynamic link bandwidth sharing will be adopted. In addition, an AWG that performs cell-by-cell routing and a distributed large scale ATM system are realized. Optical routing achieves the 5 Tb/s needed in future B-ISDN ATM backbone systems     

用MEMS光开关实现高性能光互连网络

建立了1Gbps传输结构的高性能光互连网络，来提高计算机群系统的网络性能。它利用微机电系统(MEMS)光开关和PCI总线全带宽网络接口卡构成光互连链路。全带宽PCI接口卡总线峰值传输速率为132Mbytes／s，光信号传输速率可达1Gbps以上。用MEMS制做的全光开关减少了光—电之间的转换，提供的开关方式与数据的波长、速率和信号格式无关。因而，利用这种网络结构，可以最大限度地减少网络延迟和网络通信开销，极大地提升了机群系统的总体性能。     

Electrical ingress buffering and traffic aggregation for opticalpacket switching and their effect on TCP-level performance in opticalmesh networks

The wide deployment of wavelength-division multiplexing technology and new transmission techniques have resulted in significant increases in the transmission capacity in optical fibers, both in the number of wavelengths and the bandwidth of each wavelength channel. Meanwhile, the fast growth of the Internet demands more data switching capacity in the network in order to deliver high bandwidth to end users. Although the capacity of electronic routers has been increasing consistently in the past, optical switching appears to be a more cost-effective way to switch individual wavelengths. As the bit rate per wavelength channel continues to grow, optical subwavelength switching emerges as a new paradigm capable of dynamically delivering the vast bandwidth WDM offers. This article discusses one of such techniques, namely optical packet switching, and its performance perceived by end users in optical mesh networks. Specifically, our investigation reveals the benefit of using electrical ingress buffering and traffic aggregation to reduce packet-loss rate of optical packet-switched networks. Through simulation experiments, we present an evaluation of the network's TCP-level performance based on the proposed architecture     

Commercial, legal, and international aspects of packet communications

Packet switching technology emerged rapidly in the 1970's as another viable mode of communications switching, along with circuit and message switching. Since packet switching offers economical and versatile data communication capabilities in a multiuser environment, it is particularly well suited for furnishing public data communication network services. Public packet networks are now established or being developed in most industrialized countries, and the introduction of these networks has raised policy issues relating to the structure and regulation of the national networks, and the interconnection of national networks into an international packet switching system. This paper reviews these issues and concludes that public packet switching network services will continue to be regulated in all cases; that competitive packet networks will coexist in the U.S. and in Canada, but that only one national packet network will exist in each of most other countries; that packet networks will aggravate the problem of distinguishing nonregulated data processing services from regulated data communication services; that international interconnection of public packet networks based upon CCITT standanh will occur rapidly over the next several years; and that a unified international packet switching system will eventually emerge similar to today's international telephone and telex systems.     

Optoelectronic InP-InGaAs smart pixels for optical interconnectionsand computing

We describe InP-InGaAs optoelectronic smart pixels for applications in optical interconnection and computing. These circuits consist of monolithically integrated p-i-n photodiodes, heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) receivers and transmitters, and surface-bonded folded-cavity surface-emitting lasers (FCSEL's). Design, fabrication, and performance of two different circuits: a high-sensitivity pixel, and a high-bandwidth pixel with logic functions are discussed. We achieve a minimum switching energy of 6 fJ, a maximum pixel bandwidth of 800 MHz, and an optoelectronic gain of 3. To our knowledge, these are the best overall performance characteristics of any optoelectronic smart pixel technology and are competitive or superior to that achieved using all-electronic interconnects     

Scheduling algorithms for optical packet fabrics

Utilizing optical technologies to build packet fabrics for high-capacity switches and routers has several advantages in terms of scalability, power consumption, and cost. However, several technology related problems have to be overcome to be able to use such an approach. The reconfiguration times of optical crossbars are longer than those of electronic fabrics and end-to-end clock recovery in such systems add to the reconfiguration overheads. Both these problems can limit the efficiency of optical packet fabrics. In addition, existing work on input-buffered switches mostly assumes fixed size packets (referred as envelopes in this paper). When fixed size switching is used for Internet protocol networks where packets are of variable size, the incoming packets need to be fragmented to fit the fixed size envelopes. This fragmentation can lead to, possibly large loss of bandwidth and even instability. This paper addresses all of the above issues by presenting packetization and scheduling techniques that allow optical packet fabrics to be used within switches and routers. The proposed scheme aggregates multiple packets in a single envelope and when used in combination with proper scheduling algorithms, it can provide system stability as well as bandwidth and delay guarantees. As a result of the aggregation method, the reconfiguration frequency required from the optics is reduced, facilitating the use of optical technologies in implementing packet switch fabrics.     

Deploying GPON technology for backhaul applications

Gigabit passive optical network (GPON) technology offers the reach and bandwidth capabilities that make it suitable for more than just residential and business access deployments. Other potential applications include the backhaul of traffic from local exchanges or wireless masts to a central node for switching and routing. Such applications share a common theme in that they could be served by direct fibre as the distances are modest (between 5 and 30 km), their bandwidth requirements are volatile but in total amount to several Gbit/s, and all traffic needs to be transported back to a central core node as opposed to requiring intermediate switching. This paper compares GPON with a number of competing technologies in metropolitan areas, and shows that GPON can rival these approaches both in terms of capability, equipment costs and fibre usage.     

Optical computing and interconnects

This paper discusses the present status of optical computing and interconnects, including device technology, and recent progress in three types of optical computing-analog, digital, and neural-is introduced. Examples of technologies used in an analog computing system, a technique for the optimal design of coherent phase-only spatial filters, and a new version of incoherent filtering are presented. The use of the modified sign digit number representation and its applications to digital optical computing are also described. Some architectures for optical neural computing are introduced, and the importance of optical interconnect technology in parallel computing is stressed. Permutation techniques, the board-to-board level interconnection techniques, and switching techniques are reviewed. Recent developments in optoelectronic devices and passive optical elements are outlined and finally some technological issues in optical computing and interconnects for practical use are discussed     

Optics and supercomputing

Storage, interconnection, and processing are discussed. Various types of optical disks and page-oriented holographic memories are considered. It is shown that optical storage is advancing rapidly and holds the potential of hundreds of megabytes per second data rates from a single storage unit, which can provide many new opportunities for supercomputing. Module-to-module, board-to-board, and chip-to-chip interconnection and gate-to-gate communication are discussed. It is concluded that optical interconnection is, in many cases, superior to electronic interconnection and holds the key to the development of future electrooptic systems. Optical computing devices are discussed and various application areas where optical processing as well as storage and interconnection are expected to play a role in the future are considered. The authors believe that optical processing, while holding considerable promise, lags behind its electronic counterpart primarily due to the fact that digital optical device development is in its infancy. They predict near-term systems will be electrooptic, with each technology providing its strength to the problem at hand     

High-Performance Hybrid-Switching Optical Router for IP over WDM Integration

Because pure electrical routers with their bandwidth limitations can hardly keep up with the tremendous traffic growth in the Internet, optical routers based on various optical switching techniques including optical wavelength switching (OWS), optical burst switching (OBS), and optical packet switching (OPS) have been suggested to cope with this problem. However, because OBS and OPS are both in their early experimental phase and OWS only provides coarse granularity switching, a hybrid-switching optical router with combined OWS and electrical packet switching is a necessity in order to accommodate the entire multi-granularity traffic with multi-service requirements in a cost-effective manner. Its coordination capability of optical circuit switching and electrical packet switching enables efficient/intelligent usage of network resources. In this paper, we first review research and developments of such IP routers employing optical switching/interconnection techniques and examine how these techniques can be used inside routers to scale node capacity and to improve optical Internet performance. We also present and study the performance of a terabit optical router with an optical-electrical hybrid-switching fabric. The node architecture is based on the idea of IP over WDM integration with Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS). The network-level performance evaluations show that the proposed hybrid-switching optical router is a cost-effective solution for building the next generation GMPLS-based multi-granularity optical Internet.     

850 nm高速垂直腔面发射激光器技术研究进展（特邀）

垂直腔面发射激光器(VCSEL)具有低成本、低阈值、高速率和低功耗等优点,在短距离光互连中有着重要的应用。随着大数据、超级计算机技术的发展,短距离光互连性能需求越来越高,从而对高速调制的850 nm VCSEL技术提出了更高要求。从带宽限制机理、调制新方法两方面详细回顾了高速850 nm VCSEL技术最新进展,对技术发展趋势进行了总结与展望。     

Digital optics

The authors discuss digital optics, a technology for processing, transport, and storage of optical digital information. Digital optics offers both the high temporal bandwidth of fiber communications and the high connectivity and information density of optical imaging. The energy dissipation per bit of communicated information, as well as the chip area dedicated to interconnections, can be significantly lower in optics than in high-speed electronics. This motivates the introduction of parallel optical interconnections through free space in communication-intensive areas of digital information processing such as switching in telecommunications and within multiprocessors. Digital optical circuits can be constructed by cascading two-dimensional planar arrays of optical logic gates interconnected in free space. The state of the art and the trends in digital optical information processing systems for optical logic, optoelectronic interfaces, and optical free-space interconnection systems are reviewed     

Hybrid hierarchical optical networks

Hybrid hierarchical optical cross-connects enhance the performance/cost ratio of optical networks by providing transparent (optical) switching of sets of wavelengths (wavebands) in addition to opaque (electrical) switching of individual wavelengths. As network bandwidth gets cheaper, and the performance bottleneck moves to switching nodes, these systems provide an attractive scalable solution for next-generation optical networks. We describe key technological components (including flexible nonuniform wavebands) of hybrid hierarchical optical cross-connects and discuss their performance/cost implications.     

Optical Interconnection Networks for Terabit Packet Switches

The challenge of building packet switches with terabit capacity is being met by wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) where the benefits of optical fiber are exploited. Two kinds of WDM-based bufferless optical interconnection networks are proposed in this paper to interconnect multiple electronic packet switch modules. One is based on 3-stage Clos principle and the other is based on broadcast-and-select principle. The proposed optical interconnection networks are implemented with small modular structures to provide capacities in the range of terabit per second. Their architectures, component and interconnection complexity, and power budget analyzes are presented. In addition, the crosstalk caused by the finite ON-OFF ratio of semiconductor optical amplifier is discussed. Bit error rates with respect to different ON-OFF ratios and extinction ratios are also evaluated. It is concluded that it is feasible to implement optical interconnection networks by using state-of-the-art WDM technology, and they are excellent candidates for future terabit packet switching systems.     

Planar packaging of free-space optical interconnections

Planar optics is an approach to build integrated free-space optical systems on single substrates. Computer-aided design, lithographic fabrication, and micro-bonding techniques are used to package the optics in a compact way. This paper reviews recent work on planar optics. It discusses various aspects of the fabrication, the design, and the application of planar optics as an interconnection technology for optoelectronic computing and switching systems     

A novel transmitter/receiver switching circuit configuration forhigh-performance LD transceiver in subscriber loop

LD (laser diode) transceivers are very effective in reducing optical subscriber systems cost because they act as transmitters and receivers. This paper proposes a new transceiver switching circuit configuration, and two techniques for suppressing and canceling the discharge current effect of laser diodes. The new techniques, including mounting substrate optimization such as high-isolation and low parasitic capacitance, yield a high-performance LD transceiver module with the minimum average receiving optical power level of -37.0 dBm and a wide dynamic range of up to 25 dB for burst mode optical input at 29.0 Mb/s