John C., re: message # 1211
The label swapping technique is interesting, although I've seen others like this using wavelength conversion techniques in the past. If you follow the IEEE Communications papers, there are white papers up the ying yang that are equally ingenious, but likewise follow a proprietary schema which make them very unlikely to succeed on a wide scale. While this doesn't take away from their brilliance in any way, only a few of these good ideas in ten thousand ever make it to commercial reality.
I'll read the remaining papers (thanks for the weekend homework assignment, John, and my wife and kids thank you, too ;) in their entirety (the more I read this, the more it seems to me that I've read it before), and get back to you. As I skim through it, there appears to be a hint of Avenex beneath what I've read thus far, despite (or maybe because of?) Cisco's and Agilent's presence on the NGI team. Then again, if what this team is attempting to do is simply a natural outgrowth of where past technologies are leading to, then it's not too much of a surprise that multiple players are striving to do the same thing. And perhaps, some of them going about it in ways that appear to be similar. One thing that is a given is the need to do optical bypass through wavelength conversion in order to prevent blocking from node to node, when signals are being carried on different parts of the network at the same wavelength. When this occurs, someone has to change their wavelength (lane) and move over to a different lane (wavelength), and in so doing they have "bypassed" the conflict. That's a primary reason for doing wavelength conversion, in the first place. Note that I've not touched on the other aspects of those papers here, just a sall part that had to do with wavelength conversion.
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Ray, re: message # 1212
I don't know why you say this is OT. The thread isn't one that is uniquely dedicated to comms. The tag idea is an old one, by the way. I can recall rf plants like this one being promoted about twelve years ago. Gruntel & Co was pushing a company that would allow these to be used to track livestock, if I'm not mistaken. That was in 1989. More recently, Applied Digital Solutions (ADSX) has been touting a product offering called "Digital Angel" that they are suggesting might even be used as an implant in humans (to prevent children from wandering off too far? or, perhaps parolees?). I picked this snip up from the ADSX thread:
Background on Digital Angel(TM)
In December of 1999, Applied Digital Solutions announced that it had acquired the patent rights to a miniature digital transceiver -- which it has named Digital Angel. Digital Angel will be able to send and receive data and be located by GPS (Global Positioning System) technology. The company believes this technology will enable it to tap into a multi-billion dollar marketplace with a number of applications that will prove to be extremely popular. These potential applications include: monitoring the medical condition of at-risk patients; tracking endangered wildlife or household pets; managing livestock and other farm-related animals; pinpointing the location of valuable stolen property; finding lost airline baggage and postal packages; managing the commodity supply chain; preventing the unauthorized use of firearms; and providing a tamper-proof means of identification for enhanced e-commerce security. For more information about Digital Angel, visit
digitalangel.net . |
