摘要 |
A system for assigning wavelengths in an optical switch to enable unicast, broadcast and multicast traffic to be sent through the switch. The optical switch enables data to be switched in the optical domain as opposed to conventional switching in the electrical domain. This permits a very high data capacity and data rate using well-known WDM technology. Tunable transmitters are configured to connect each input port to a different output port within the switch. During each cycle of the switch the transmitters are programmed to a particular wavelength, the wavelength determining the destination output port. Interface (I/F) cards issue requests to send data to the switch and receive acknowledgements indicating permission to send data to a particular destination port. A controller processes the requests received from the I/F card to generate a set of acknowledgements. A two-way round robin technique is used to select the destination ports for each I/F card based on the requests received.
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