Somewhat related to CUBE/HLIT. Lucent develops all-optical router.....
eetimes.com
Lucent router sets the stage for all-optical nets
By Nicolas Mokhoff
EE Times
(11/19/99, 3:49 p.m. EDT)
MURRAY HILL, N.J. — The age of optics appears closer with Lucent Technologies' recent introduction of what it calls the industry's first high-capacity, all-optical router. The LambdaRouter, based on technology from Lucent's Bell Labs, is a series of microscopic mirrors that instantly direct and route optical signals from fiber to fiber in a network, eliminating the need to first convert them to electrical form.
Lucent said that this will save service providers up to 25 percent in operational costs and enable them to direct network traffic 16 times faster than electrical switches.
One of the 256 microscopic mirrors in Lucent Bell Labs' array.
PSINet (Herndon, Va.), an Internet service provider, has selected the router for its global Internet Protocol (IP) network. When the router is deployed, the company will become the first network operator to carry frame relay traffic at OC-192 (10-Gbit/second) speeds over a core optical network: a 400 percent increase over today's standard 2.5-Gbit/s transmission rates.
PSINet also will try out Lucent's next-generation WaveStar OLS-400G dense wave-division multiplexing optical networking system. The company claims that the WaveStar 400G is the first DWDM system to transport information over as many as 80 wavelengths, or colors, of light, on a single fiber. Each single-fiber wavelength supports speeds of up to 10 Gbits/s.
Gerry Butters, president of Lucent's Optical Networking Group, said, "In the 21st century, all-optical networks will deliver vast amounts of information, literally at the speed of light, unimpeded by the bottlenecks of conventional transport systems."
Arun Netravali, named president of Bell Labs last month, made seven predictions for communications in the next millennium at Lucent's Media Day this past week.
Netravali predicted that bandwidth will become too cheap to meter, billing systems will be dramatically simpler and service, not bandwidth, will become the key factor in charging customers. Service will be more important because the cost of transporting a bit over an optical network is now declining by half every nine months.
The LambdaRouter is based on Bell Labs' MicroStar technology, in which an array of tiny micromechanical mirrors is positioned so that each mirror is illuminated by a single wavelength. The mirrors are tilted so that an individual wavelength can be passed to any of 256 input and output fibers. All 256 mirrors are fabricated on less than one square inch of silicon. This compact switching fabric provides a switching density more than 32 times greater than electronic fabrics today. And with no optical-electrical-optical conversion, the LambdaRouter switch fabric will provide a reduction in power consumption 100 times greater than electronic fabric solutions.
MicroStar was first demonstrated at last month's Telecom '99 show in Geneva, and Lucent plans to bring it to market within 15 months. The LambdaRouter, which will offer more than 10 terabits/s of total switching capacity, will be available in December 2000.
The WaveStar LambdaRouter is the centerpiece of Lucent's vision of the all-optical network. Over the last several months, the company has introduced a series of optical products for nearly every part of the network — from long-distance and local metropolitan areas to undersea and business campuses.
Bell Labs has garnered more than 2,000 patents in optical technology alone. With more than 5,000 systems installed worldwide, Lucent has the largest share — 29 percent — of the $2.2 billion global DWDM optical equipment market, according to KMI Corp., a Newport, R.I.-based market research firm. |
