Optical telecommunications network

摘要

A packet carried on an optical network is routed by carrying out a logic operation on an address word carried in a packet header and a predetermined discriminator word. A routing decision is made in accordance with the result of the logic operation. The logic operation may be a bit-wise Boolean AND operation. An additional logic operation may be carried out with an additional discriminator word to determine whether the packet is destined for a remote region of the network. In this case, the packet may be steered directly to the remote region.