Abstract

The explosion in bandwidth demand over the backbone network has led to a bottleneck in switching information. Indeed, the capacity of fiber transmission lines has been growing at a much faster rate over the past few years than the throughput capacity of switching nodes. Commercially available fiber transmission systems now carry more than 1 Tb/s of information per fiber. The largest electronic cross-connects have barely reached 1 Tb/s of total throughput. Now imagine 10 optical fibers terminating in a switching node and each one carrying eventually 1 Tb/s or more traffic. It is easy to see that switching nodes with at least 10 Tb/s throughput capacity are needed in order to handle this type of fiber capacities.

© 2001 Optical Society of America