Broadband optical network technology for next generation LAN and access systems

For local and metropolitan area networks, some recently developed optical processing may be used for packet routing at data rates to 100 Gbis and higher per user. These optical time-division multiplexed (OTDM) single channel local or metropolitan area network may have the same capacity as a number of WDM lower rate channels. However, OTDM networks can provide potential improvements in terms of user access time, delay, and throughput for bursty traffic. To compare and contrast OTDM with WDM we describe architecture and technology for single-stream 100 Gb/s local/metropolitan area shared media networks.