A SOLITON RING NETWORK

The recent demonstration of ultrafast, cascadable, all-optical soliton gates, although with long latency and at an early stage of research, opens the possibility of niche exploitation in architectures whose performance is primarily limited by the absence of a few such logic elements. A candidate system is a widely distributed, self-routing short packet, slotted ring system running at peak rates well beyond that of the conventional electronic hosts at each access node. We describe here an architecture for a system with a 1.25GHz packet rate, 32-bit payload, and 100 Gb/s peak bit rate serving a few hundred user nodes. Optical format is retained by through-going node traffic, so that the overhead of conversion to/from electronics is incurred only at the source and destination. This design effort has served to sharpen our understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of using such gates in carefully chosen applications.