ALL-OPTICAL PACKET-SWITCHED METROPOLITAN-AREA NETWORK PROPOSAL

This paper describes a proposal submitted to DARPA in late 1991 by a consortium consisting of IBM, Los Alamos National Laboratory, GTE Laboratories, British Telecom Dupont Technologies, Lasertron, Micron Optics, University of California at Santa Barbara, and University of Colorado at Boulder to develop a precompetitive, commercially viable all-optical network, architecture using dense optical wavelength division. The objective was to demonstrate a packet-switched high-capacity all-optical LAN/MAN network based on wavelength division multiplexing capable of supporting several hundred to a thousand nodes, each requiring gigabit-per-second throughputs.