This paper summarizes work conducted at Bellcore over the last few years concerning the LAMBDANET™ multiwavelength optical network. We describe the basic network architecture and some variations, including discussion of several applications based on these architectures. Finally, we present experimental results demonstrating the technological feasibility of this approach. The LAMBDANET design incorporates three basic ingredients: 1) it associates a unique optical wavelength with each transmitting node in a cluster of nodes; 2) the physical topology is that of a broadcast star; 3) each receiving node identifies transmitting nodes based on the transmission wavelength through wavelength demultiplexing. This network design features full connectivity among the nodes, large nonblocking throughput, data format transparency, and flexible control. The LAMBDANET network may be used for both point-to-point and point-to-multipoint applications. The paper discusses possible applications for this basic structure including broadcast video, private virtual networks, and packet switching. Experiments to verify the salient optical characteristics demonstrated the largest multicast WDM transmission capacity measured to date. With 18 transmitters at 1.5 Gb/s per transmitter and 16 receiving nodes, the largest point-to-point bandwidth-distance product is 1.56 Tb. s−1. km, and the point-to-multipoint figure of merit is 21.5 Tb. s−1 km. node. A point-to-point WDM experiment (no star coupler) is also described that achieved a bandwidth-distance product of 2.07 Tb ∙ km/s and 36 Gb/s total transmitted bandwidth. © 1990 IEEE
