Abstract
Efforts in realizing all-optical packet switching are overwhelming in the past decade.
While optical packet switching remains an attractive switching paradigm in the long run, technical
challenges prohibit it from becoming a practical solution for the ever-growing bandwidth hunger
during the next few years. Finding a technically viable way to meet the increasing capacity
requirement with good scalability and flexibility becomes a clear pursue for the community. Hybrid
packet and circuit switching is considered to be one promising technique in realizing high
performance switching at low cost and less energy consumption, by taking the advantage of both
packet switching and circuit switching. In this paper, we review existing work in hybrid optical
packet and circuit switching. We discuss the key technical challenges in realizing hybrid optical
packet and circuit switching. We further introduce our ongoing efforts in building a seamlessly
transformable packet/circuit-switching node with hybrid optical and electronic components. We show
that in a hybrid node, the scheduling complexity with typical scheduling algorithms may be reduced
to half of a node running in full packet switching mode.
© 2013 Chinese Optics Letters
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