Routing and Label Stacking in All-Optical Label Swapping Networks

The evolution of computer networks in the Internet has propelled Optical Transport Networks (OTN) in recent years. While the optical switching granularity has evolved from wavelengths to packets with very promising architectures, completely optical forwarding functions are still challenging ideals. In particular, although optical codification and transmission of information has been successfully performed, optical processing has been foreseen to be one of the main bottlenecks in OTNs. With the recent deployment of All-Optical Flip-Flops (AOFF) and All-Optical Logical XOR Gates (AOLXG) technologies, optical processing is closer to become a reality nowadays for All-Optical Packet Switching (AOPS).