Demonstration of the Interconnection of Two Optical Packet Rings with a Hybrid Optoelectronic Packet Router

: We demonstrate the interconnection of two optical packet switching systems: a hybrid optoelectronic packet router and two optical packet rings. Error-free inter-ring and intra-ring optical packet transmission and unicast and multicast transport of encapsulated 10 GbE are achieved. Introduction With the emergence of new high bandwidth and low latency applications such as high-definition TV, video conferencing, or online gaming, there is a need for a simplified, low cost, and low power consumption network from the access to the metro core. In addition, the recent standardization of 10G EPON systems [1] creates new opportunities for 10 Gb/s burst mode technology in the metro network. In this paper, we demonstrate a new metro network architecture that interconnects packet-optical add drop multiplexer (P-OADM) ring networks [2] transparently through a hybrid optoelectronic packet router (HOPR) [3]. Both systems are based on optical packet switching technologies for reducing cost, power, and latency and are burst mode compliant. We investigate the physical layer of the network through BER measurements and demonstrate the labeling scheme required for interconnecting the two systems. We achieve error-free operation of inter-ring and intra-ring packet transmission for both unicast and multicast traffic. Finally, we transport 10 GbE encapsulated by optical packets and show that the labeling scheme implemented can dynamically reconfigure the path of the data packets by streaming MPEG-2 videos for different network traffic scenarios.