A multi-Gb/s optoelectronic packet switching network

An optical distributed interconnect architecture is described. The system is a multihop, high-capacity network transporting short, compressed packets optically from source to destination. The geographical scale is primarily from backplane to campus-scale environments, although continental scales are not hard to accommodate. The short packets result in maximal flexibility for the network users with packet sizes equal to their natural word size. In addition, optical packet time compression/decompression techniques are used to raise the point-to-point fiber bandwidth above 10 Gb/s, overwhelming contention and other network problems with bandwidth, without requiring high-speed electronics or precision synchronization. The packet compression/decompression techniques are described in some detail.<<ETX>>