UFORIC: Ultra-Fast Optical Routing including Impairment Constraints

The research to be undertaken within UFORIC proposes an ultra-fast control plane concept that relies on using a hardware-based protocol to route information across an all-optical switched network. Since a signal traversing through an all-optical network acquires optical impairments along the transmission links and the switching nodes, the concept will develop a concept that allows a path to be chosen that minimises particluar optical impairments and guarantees an acceptal level of degradation (= bit-error rate). Essentially, the UFORIC control plane will simultaneously find a path through the network that satifies both the bandwidth and optical performance requirements of a requesting service. Since the majority of the processing is done at very high speed within a field programmable gate array (FPGA), this will be many orders of magnitude faster than can be achieved using today's software-based solutions. This is essential for optical packet- and burst-switched networking concepts of the future. The trade-off, however, will be the accuracy in the choice of paths and this will be determined within the scope of the project. The UFORIC control plane will be integrated into an all-optical research network testbed to demonstrate its operation.