Demonstrating 100 Gbps optical packet switching using 16-bit longest prefix matching forwarding engine

Abstract

Wire-rate packet processing and its energy saving for over 100 Gbps speed of line are the issues to resolve in optical packet switching. For that purpose, we have newly developed an electronic header processing unit for optical packets in which the 23-bit longest prefix matching (LPM) forwarding engine LSIs are embedded. This paper reports the successful experiment of electronic header processing and optical switching of optical packets by the use of the LSIs. This success also indicates that optical packet switching has gotten close to deployment to the IP networks, where a 16-bit optical packet address is simply copied from a 32-bit IPv4 address. Keywords-optical packet switching, forwarding information base, longest prefix matching.