Photonic Slot Routing in Optical Transport Networks

All-optical networking is generally believed to be the only solution for coping with the ever-increasing demands in bandwidth, such as the World Wide Web application. Optical backbone networks efficiently achieve a high level of traffic aggregation by multiplexing numerous users on circuit-switched wavelength paths - the so-called wavelength routing approach. In contrast, the reduced level of traffic aggregation in access and metro networks makes wavelength routing solutions not adequate. In the