UNIFIED ASSOCIATIVE MEMORY OF DATA CHANNEL SCHEDULERS IN AN OPTICAL ROUTER

摘要

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide an optical switch network including optical routers to route information in optical fibers.;SOLUTION: Each fiber carries a plurality of data channels 20, a data channel group 14 and a control channel 16 altogether. Data are carried on the data channels in a form of data burst and control information is carried on the control channel 18 in a form of burst header packets. The burst header packet includes routing information with respect to an associated data burst 28 and the information is antecedent to the associated data burst. Parallel scheduling in a plurality of delays can be used for faster scheduling. In one embodiment, a time and gap not scheduled can be processed by a unified memory for more efficient operations.;COPYRIGHT: (C)2002,JPO