Optical slot switched networks

We propose several ring architectures for optical slot switching ring networks, which can be used in metro or datacenter applications. The key devices, namely, fast wavelength-tunable laser, burst-mode coherent receiver (which are required to enable high datarate transmission at 100 Gb/s and above), and a slot blocker for improved spectrum efficiency are described and available technologies for each key building block are reviewed. The proposed ring architectures are also numerically compared to quantify the utilization of deployed resources.