We describe: (i) the architecture of an optical burst switched (OBS) demonstration network overlaying the ATDnet transparent all-optical testbed, and (ii) experiments underway in the testbed. The OBS overlay uses a simple hardware-based protocol embedded in OBS network controllers to manage commercial off-the-shelf DWDM switches. Data paths are all-optical and completely transparent, and can carry analog or digital traffic in any format, data rate, and modulation scheme. Experiments with latency-and jittersensitive HDTV transmission, petabyte file transfers, and immersive real time visualization of satellite imagery over the OBS network are ongoing. Parallel research on transport protocols, QoS-aware routing protocols, adaptors for an OBS LAN, and a network management architecture will be applied as completed. This is the first just-in-time (JIT) OBS field trial known to the authors.

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Optical Burst Switching (OBS) is emerging as an optical networking technology combining best of the features of optical circuit-switching technology and optical packetswitching technology. This paper discusses architecture and hardware implementation of a Network Interface Card (NIC) for an OBS network. The NIC implements a specific low-latency signaling protocol Just-in-Time (JIT) for OBS networks. This NIC can handle data streams up to 1 Gbps. Average OBS JIT signaling message processing time with this NIC is on the order of 1 microsecond. This is the first JIT OBS NIC implementation known to the authors. Complementary efforts are on-going to develop other elements for the OBS network.

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Abstract. In this paper, we propose a novel metropolitan area network (MAN) ring architecture, ORBIS, a multiple-service WDM platform that supports multiple transport techniques. The WDM ring is horizontally divided into multiple subnetworks, each of which supportsonetype of the traffi.c with a subset ofthe total wavelengths. The system and subnetwork control mechanism and reconfiguration issues are addressed in this paper.