Abstract

Introduoction. STARNET, an experimental multi-Gbit/s WDM LAN being developed at Stanford University, supports both circuit-switched and packet-switched services and facilitates network control by creating two logical sub-networks, a 2.5-Gbit/s reconfigurable circuit-switched subnetwork and a 125 Mb/s FDDI-compatible, ring subnetwork, on a single physical star topology.¹ Packet-switched data and network control information are transmitted over the multihop packet-switched ring sub-network while high speed continuous data are transmitted over the reconfigurable circuit- switched subnetwork. The two logical subnetworks are implemented by equipping each node with one transmitter capable of multiplexing packet-switched data using amplitude modulation and circuit-switched data using phase modulation on a single optical carrier. Each node is also equipped with two receivers which recover the data separately from amplitude and phase modulation.

© 1994 Optical Society of America