All-Optical Label Stacking: Easing the Trade-Offs Between Routing and Architecture Cost in All-Optical Packet Switching

All-Optical Label Swapping (AOLS) forms a key technology towards the implementation of All-Optical Packet Switching nodes (AOPS) for the future optical Internet. The capital expenditures of the deployment of AOLS increases with the size of the label spaces (i.e. the number of used labels), since a special optical device is needed for each recognized label on every node. Label space sizes are affected by the way in which demands are routed. For instance, while shortest-path routing leads to the usage of fewer labels but high link utilization, minimum interference routing leads to the opposite. This paper studies All-Optical Label Stacking (AOLStack), which is an extension of the AOLS architecture.