Optical IP Switching(1)

Optical IP Switching (OIS), is a novel method of creating transparent optical connections between network nodes using a flow-based approach. An IP flow is a collection of IP packets going from the same source to the same destination: the exchange of IP packets is the mechanism that allows the transport of information over the Internet.

Recent studies have shown that Internet traffic presents a heavy tail distribution, where a small number of flows carries a huge amount of data. This suggests the possibility of dynamically adapting the optical connections to carry these heavy flows.

Currently a packet has to traverse a certain number of routers, before reaching its destination and the network routers must analyze each packet and forward it towards the direction of the destination node. However since a flow is defined as a sequence of packets going from the same source to the same destination, if the router recognises the flow it could create a short-cut by creating a “switched” connection allowing all the packets belonging to the same IP flow to proceed directly towards the correct direction without being analyzed one after the other. This general idea is known as IP switching.

August 14, 2011

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